Popcorn (2 page)

THREE

I
stand here on legs of fire.”

It was after eleven on the morning after the Oscars, and the police had left Bruce alone for almost two hours. They had given him some breakfast, which he had surprised himself by eating, and since then he had been sitting drinking cold coffee (institutional blend) and watching himself on the various morning news shows. He did not watch
Coffee Time
: that would have been too much to bear. He could just imagine how happy Oliver and Dale would be to see him brought so low after the mugging he had given them the day before. What crocodile tears they would shed over his bloodied remains. No, that he could not watch, although he found no better comfort on any of the numerous other channels that were covering his story.

Over and over again he accepted his Oscar. On ABC and CBS and NBC. On Fox and CNN and about a million other cable channels, there he was, grinning like the idiot he had proved himself to be.

“I stand here on legs of fire.”

Legs of fire? Horrible. Ugly, mawkish, inept, meaningless.

They loved it.

“I want to thank you.” Of course he did. “Each and every person in this room. Each and every person in this industry. You nourished me and helped me to touch the stars. Helped me be better than I had any right to be. Better than the best — which is what you all are. What can I say?”

Here Bruce’s voice began to crack slightly, and over a billion people had wondered whether he was going to cry. He didn’t. Even though he had turned into the creature of the mob, he was not so far possessed by them as actually to blub on cue.

“I am humble,” he lied, “humble and small…but also proud and big, big in heart, big in love, big in head.” (for one eerie moment it had seemed as if an unheard-of moment of veracity was about to intrude on the proceedings. “Did he just say ‘big in head’?” the glittering throng were about to ask themselves. But Bruce had merely stopped mid-word in order to gulp down his emotions) “big in headstrong dedication to being the best artist I know how,” he continued, “the best American human being I can be, and to improving my one-on-one relationship with God. Thank you, America. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this great industry. Because this is a great industry, a great American industry full of wonderful people. People whose extraordinary, awesome, monumental, towering, Heaven-sent talent has made me the artist I am. You are the wind beneath my wings and I flap for you. God bless you all. God bless America. God bless the world as well. Thank you.”

Bruce watched himself on the television screen and felt ill. He actually gagged at the horror of it. A tide of nausea welled up inside him, as if an air-bag had gone off and was pushing the contents of his stomach up his neck. He swallowed hard, and his throat burnt with gastric acids. How sick could a man feel? Very. He’d been awake for such a long time, and his police-issue breakfast sat uneasily on top of the fifteen-hour-old soup of party canapés and booze he’d consumed in his previous life.

How
could
he have made such a dreadful speech? No wonder bitter gall was surging up his gullet. It was the acrid taste of shame. After all, the man on the screen holding the golden statuette represented Bruce at his zenith: this was how he would be remembered in his moment of glory.

1 stand here on legs of fire!

The sound of sirens jerked Bruce out of his reverie. There were police cars on the TV now. The same footage of his home being surrounded by the forces of justice that had been playing endlessly all morning. There again was his garden, full of cops. His drive, full of cops. His roof, covered in cops. How many cops could swarm round one house? All the cops in Los Angeles, it seemed to Bruce. And TV people. TV people everywhere. In his flower beds, outside his four garages, milling round his pool.

Bruce wished they hadn’t put him in a room with a TV. He could switch it off, of course, but somehow he didn’t.

The news story arrived once more at the limousine jam. Slowly the stars and big shots got out of their enormous cars. Bruce had watched the same footage so often that he knew the order by heart. There they were again. The long, slow stream of tuxedos, polished chins, magnificent bosoms and ridiculous gowns. Absurd gowns. Ludicrous gowns. Every one of those women was like a drowning swimmer desperate to attract attention. I’m over here! Look at me!

There was the purple one now, slashed up to the armpits. Such thighs! Hollywood thighs. And nipples. Nipples like thimbles. “She’s just iced those in the car,” Bruce had thought approvingly at the time. He always appreciated professionalism, an actress’s dedication to her craft.

Now it was the turn of Bruce himself; he always came after the purple one with the thighs and nipples. The cameras of the waiting paparazzi began to flash before his car had even stopped. He was the star of the show, the hot tip for ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’. What a night! What a moment! The star of the show.

Now it was the morning after and he was still the star, though of a rather different show. Whoever said all publicity was good publicity was an idiot.

The old Bruce stepped out of his limo and on to the red carpet, just as he had done twenty times already on every channel that morning. Turn, smile and wave. Check the bow-tie. Tug at the ear-lobe. Nervous, humble body language. Tiny little moves that screamed, “Love me, you bastards! Look! Look! This is my night. I am the greatest director in the world, and yet I have the grace to pretend I’m just an ordinary guy.” Bruce knew every ingratiating little twitch by heart. How they cheered. How they loved him.

Except that they didn’t really love him, any more than he believed he was a regular, ordinary guy. Everyone was just acting in the manner expected of them at such an event. Television has taught the whole world how to behave. Except, of course, for the protestors: prophets as they now appeared to be, illuminated by the deceptive light of hindsight.

The pickets. Mothers Against Death. Wouldn’t
they
be pleased this morning. “Mr Delamitri,” shouted the anonymous woman who had now become a TV star, “my son was murdered. An innocent boy, gunned down on the streets. In your last picture there were seventeen murders.”

Bruce sat in the small, bare police interview room and watched his past self, thinking, “Yeah, and there was plenty of sex in my movie too, but I bet you haven’t had any for a while.”

That was what he had been thinking. Why hadn’t he said it? He couldn’t suppress the uneasy feeling that things would have been different if he had told the truth. It was completely irrational, of course, but ever since the police had left him alone he had been tortured by the thought that somehow honesty might have saved him from the terrible fate that had overtaken him.

“I stand here on legs of fire.” Jesus! Legs of fire? Just for that, he almost deserved what had happened to him.

He couldn’t have been honest, of course, particularly not to that picket line. Not in his old life. He’d had different priorities then. It was one thing haranguing Oliver and Dale about the absurdity of blaming a filmmaker for some murder that had happened in a place he’d never been to, and quite another to do it to the anguished relatives. It would have been the most terrible thing he could have done. Imagine the headlines: ‘Bruce Delamitri Insults Bereaved Mothers’. It would have been the number-one story from the ceremony, a terrible, terrible scandal. Bruce found himself actually laughing at the thought. As if he’d care now. Funny how one’s sense of proportion changes when the cops have been swarming all over your lawn and a SWAT team has smashed its way through your roof.

Bruce muted the TV. He knew by heart what the anchors were saying. What else could they say? This had to be the most spectacular reversal of fortunes they had ever had the ghoulish pleasure of reporting. The catastrophe that had overtaken Bruce had (in his opinion, anyway) the stature of a Greek tragedy — with, he was forced to reflect, all its attendant ironies.

Hubris, pride, comes before a fall. When a person is so big, so bold, so beautiful, that they come to believe that the rules that govern others no longer apply to them, that’s when fate sticks the boot in, and you can’t get any bigger, bolder or more beautiful than winning the ‘Best Director’ Oscar.

Bruce’s house was back on the screen. No cops now: it was the ‘before’ shot, serene, tranquil, to make it absolutely clear to morning America just what Bruce had lost. A gorgeous piece of footage from a video guide to the homes of Hollywood’s elite. He remembered the helicopter coming over taking the shots and what an outrageous invasion of privacy he had thought it. Again, proportion. He was a man for whom the notion of privacy no longer existed. He was public property. His lawn was on the TV and there were cops all over it. Every news agency in the world owned him. They could fly a helicopter up his backside and say it was in the public interest. Bruce stared at the beautiful home where his life used to be. He glanced around the bare room where he now sat.

What a journey he had made.

In twenty-four hours.

For the manacled young woman in the adjoining interview room her current surroundings were something of a step up. There were no cockroaches in the room, no flea-bitten dogs poking around trying to get at the food. There were no abandoned cars and no burst-open plastic sack of garbage with rats fossicking about in them. This young woman did not hail from a mansion in the Hollywood hills. Her home was a beat-up RV in a trailer park in Texas. She, too, had come a long way.

But her surroundings left her completely unmoved. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about the cops and she didn’t care about Bruce. She didn’t care where she came from or where she had ended up. Wherever it was, she’d rather be dead. He was gone and she was alone. She’d known him such a short time and now it was all over and she was alone.

FOUR

A
ll I said was that it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

If it hadn’t been so serious, a casual observer might have laughed: the almost Gothic nature of the scene was in such stark contrast to the banal conversation that accompanied it.

It was early afternoon on the day of the Oscars, and the captives were being held in a dark and dingy cellar. Toni, a woman in her early twenties, lay on her back across a table, her ankles and wrists chained to its legs. Her boyfriend, Bob, hung from a chain on the wall. His clothes had been cut away, and he looked rather sad dangling there in the tatters of what had once been an Italian suit.

The man who had made the remark about haystacks was called Errol. He and his companion, who answered only to the title of Mr Snuff, were gangsters. They carried enormous pistols wedged under their arms, which must have been very uncomfortable, and their conversation was continually punctuated with the word ‘motherfucker’. Errol and Mr Snuff were of the opinion that Bob was holding out on them in the matter of some missing drugs. Bob denied the suggestion, of course, and a search had been conducted, unsuccessfully, prompting Errol to draw the age-old comparison with the needle in the haystack.

A comparison which irritated Mr Snuff not a little. “And I’m saying it’s a dumb thing to say,” he snapped unkindly. “There ain’t no haystacks any more. Leastways, not in the experience of the average individual.”

“That’s just being pedantic,” said Errol.

“Listen, man, if the stone-cold truth is pedantic, then I guess that’s what I’m being, because I’ll bet if you was to ask every person within one hundred miles of where we’re standing if they’d ever
seen
a haystack, let alone left their works in one, they’d say, “Get the fuck outa here, motherfucker.” ”

Errol spotted the point of confusion. “It don’t mean no works,” he said.

“Say what?”

“The needle which is referred to in the expression ‘a needle in a haystack’ does not mean no drug paraphernalia. It means a needle for sewing.”

Mr Snuff seized upon the point like the practised debater he was. “It don’t matter what kind of needle we’re talking about here, you dumb motherfucker,” he explained. “The point is that no one is going to lose it in no haystack. You need to bring your metaphors into the twentieth century, man.”

Bob, still hanging from the chain, groaned a little. The two gangsters ignored him.

“How about if you was to say it’s like trying to find a line of coke in a snowdrift? Now there’s an image a person can understand.”

Now it was Errol’s turn to be contrary. “No, man, that’s bullshit,” he said angrily. “The whole point about a needle and a haystack is that they are very different things, and although it would be difficult to locate the former within the latter, it would not be impossible. Cocaine and snow are basically identical. You could never tell one from the other. One concept is improbable, the other is impossible — which is an entirely different thing.”

“Less you snorted up the entire motherfucker. You could sure tell them apart if you was to stick them up your nose.”

Errol laughed. It was a relief for both men. The discussion had been in danger of turning acrimonious, but now the tension was broken. For the two gangsters, that is; for Toni and Bob things remained stressful.

“That’s right,” Errol conceded with a grin. “If you snorted up the entire snowdrift, when you got to the stuff that made you talk bullshit at three o’clock in the morning, that would be the cocaine.”

Mr Snuff, having scored such an effective point, was in the mood to be generous. “I don’t want to make no Federal case out of this,” he said kindly. “I just think that language ought to reflect the lives of the people who are speaking it. Not some rural bullshit like needles and haystacks or…or…the early bird catches the worm. I don’t want no fucking worm, man. What is more, if I had a horse, which I don’t, I wouldn’t waste no time taking the motherfucker to water when it wasn’t thirsty in the first place.”

Bob groaned again. “Let me go. I didn’t rip nothing off, man.”

He might as well have appealed to a couple of concrete gangsters for all the good this was going to do him.

“Don’t insult me, Bob. You think I can’t count? You think me and Mr Snuff here are so dumb that we can’t count?”

Bob quickly assured Errol that he had intended no such slur.

“In which case, how come I ain’t supposed to know the difference between one hundred kilos and ninety-nine kilos, you sewer-rat? A one-hundredth part is a substantial differential. Suppose I was to cut off a one-hundredth part of you? Do you think you wouldn’t notice?”

It would have taken a more stupid man than Bob to have misunderstood the meaning of Errol’s question, but nevertheless Errol rubbed that meaning in by grabbing at Bob’s crutch. It is said that men who practise the ancient Chinese art of kung fu are capable of retracting their testicles at the first sign of danger. They probably couldn’t do it if the testicles in question were held in the vice-like grip of a large gangster.

“I gave you what Speedy gave me,” Bob protested. “I didn’t steal nothing. I’m not a thief.”

Errol released Bob’s hundredth part and turned his attention to Toni. So far she had made no contribution to the conversation, and perhaps Errol felt some social pressure to include her. He and Mr Snuff were, after all, in a way the hosts.

“Toni?” he enquired. “Is your boyfriend a thief?”

“Listen, Errol,” Toni said, attempting to sound calm and considering — no easy task when one is lying prostrate and securely bound across a table — “we ain’t getting nowhere here.”

“I know that.”

“If Bob tells you what you want to hear, you’ll kill him.”

“I’m going to kill him anyway.”

“But you can’t kill him till he’s told you where your damn hundredth part is. So he won’t tell you. We’ll be here till Christmas.”

It was a valiant effort. That she could think at all, considering the horror of her situation, was a miracle, but to have put Errol’s problem so clearly was impressive indeed.

“OK, Bob,” Errol said, levelling his gun at Toni. “If you don’t tell me right now, I’ll shoot her.”

This was a hopeless ploy. Bob was, after all, a heartless drug dealer. The chances of his being moved by appeals to his chivalry were small. Toni knew this too, but before she had time to request that she be left out of it Errol shot her.

It was a powerful gesture: the smell of gun-smoke, the echoing report in such a confined space, the scream, the blood. All this might have moved a lesser — or indeed more honourable — man than Bob to speak up and save Toni further discomfort. But Bob was, of course, not a lesser man; nor was he a more honourable one. Nobody ever is.

“I didn’t steal your drugs,” Bob said.

Errol sat down at the table, oblivious of the dying woman who lay across it. He was at his wits’ end. He and Mr Snuff had searched Bob’s apartment, his car, his clothes. Where on earth could the missing drugs be?

“Could a person get a kilo of heroin up their ass?” he asked.

“Maybe,” said Mr Snuff. “People get all sorts of things up their asses.”

A pair of plastic gloves lay on the table next to a set of scales. Errol had been wearing them earlier on when weighing out the heroin. He picked up one glove, shook Toni’s blood from it and put it on.

“I don’t have no heroin up my ass, man.” said Bob, hoping, perhaps, to save Errol the trouble of further investigation.

“Well, I wish I could trust you, Bob,” said Errol. “To tell you the truth, I am not relishing the prospect of probing your butt with my finger any more than I imagine you relish the prospect of having your butt probed. But I cannot trust you, Bob, which is what all of this unpleasantness is about.”

Errol stuck his hand down the back of Bob’s jockey shorts and executed his investigation. “No drugs up here,” he said.

“Maybe she’s got them,” said Mr Snuff, peering up between Toni’s legs. “No drugs here, I think,” he said from beneath her skirt, “but a very nice—”

Then suddenly a voice from nowhere said, “Thank you. Stop right there.”

And they stopped.

Errol froze. Mr Snuff froze. They all froze. There was not the slightest movement. Mr Snuff’s head remained under Toni’s skirt, Errol’s expression remained one of bored indifference, Bob’s grimace of pain seemed to have been painted on. Everything had stopped — not just stopped but
really
stopped. Nobody was doing
anything
. Toni was not bleeding any more. Nobody was even breathing.