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The snapper grunted. In his haste he’d shoved two feet into one leg of his Gaultiers. He scowled across at Lavender but she was into her forty-fifth inner-vaginal orgasm and so barely aware he was AWOL from the Futon.
There were hideous whale sounds playing on the CD. The flask of amyl nitrate he’d brought lay untouched atop the Jeff Koons Retrospective catalogue. That little gift had been received with all the enthusiasm of a box of Quality Streets on a first date.
“Bye, lover,’ the snapper mouthed, quickly syphoning Givenchy beneath each armpit before picking up the keys to his Harley and tossing them twice into the air. Lavender was silent but the whales hooted their eerie farewell.
THE KILL
It was raining – but then the rain always drizzled on a true paparazzo. They stank of the rain – it steamed from their anoraks and snaked through their hair gel, bubbling like mucus. Without the rain they would have lost the kudos that came with the cupped cigarettes and the serious body-hunch.
As the snapper strolled across to join the straggle they quickly banded together, staring like meerkats spoiling for a fight.
‘Who is it in there tonight?’
‘Fuck-knows.’
‘Again? We did him last night.’ ‘Very funny.’ ‘You think so?’ ‘No, actually.’
‘It’s Paul Daniels, I saw him go in.’
‘Buggeroff.’
‘Buggeroffyerself.’
Some even claimed it was the patter and camaraderie that kept them loyal to the job.
The snapper tried to shin a low wall but slipped and scuffed his trainers and grazed his palm into the bargain. He swore and scowled at the nearest of the pack, daring him to laugh. He didn’t.
There was a sudden surge around the entrance to the hotel and the heartwarming sound of a scuffle breaking out. The paparazzi moved as one beast, pressing forward, pushing, lining up for a sniff of their prey. Someone moved from the darkness out into the street-lights and a volley of silver flashes greeted their arrival. A huge meatball of a bodyguard appeared from nowhere and a small guy in a new pair of Timberlands had his nose crushed to a crimson coulis by the lens of his own Leica.
They all had stepladders ready in case it was Prince. In the event the ladders were superfluous because the man who finally stepped into the glare of the lights was tall enough to be seen in any crowd.
‘Who the …?’
‘Shit, give us some space for Christssake. I was here first you know …’
The jostling became violent as the bodyguard leant his full weight to the crush. Squeezed like lemons, the paparazzi oozed a collective odour of Key West. The snapper’s foot found someone’s calf beneath it and he used it as the lever he needed to haul himself onto the wall behind.
The man in the middle of the crowd turned full-face and he recognized him at once; the chill wind of jealousy blew throughout his vitals.
‘Mik-Mak!’ The whisper went round. The paparazzi virtually slobbered with glee. Mik Veronsky, supersnapper. Exclusive, elusive and charismatic enough to be worth a few bob in the next day’s papers. The pages of Vogue and Tatler had been liberally peppered with shots of his face for the past month but now he was about to be captured for the benefit of the nation’s chip-wrappings and cat litter-tray linings, too.
The snapper swallowed hard and his camera dropped waist-high as his colleagues moved in for the kill.
Supersnapper – what the fuck did that mean? All it meant was that Mik Veronsky charged more to do less. And got to screw all the best women. It meant he was top barker in the whole pack of snivelling hounds. It also meant he was flavour of the month with the fashion journos. Mention his name to Lavender Allcock-Hopkins and a greedy, syrupy little smile would gather across her suet-white face. He raised his camera reluctantly and faffed around with the focus instead.
Mik had lost his rag now – he was really raging. He’d grabbed a nearby journo and was trying to tear the poor sod’s epiglottis out with his bare hands.
What was it that women saw in him? He was taller than necessary with wide shoulders and a skinny, demi-starved frame. His skin was vampire-white and his hair as black as the long coat he always wore. His outfit was de rigueur supersnapper: boots, jeans, acres of ethnic jewellery, stupid fucking hand-woven hat that looked like it had been stolen from some passing Kurd or other. Hair extensions? Did normal men have hair that far down their backs? And hadn’t it been cropped short last season? Eyes like angry dark stones.
Mik wasn’t handsome in the pipe-and-knitting-pattern sort of style, but he was, in a casual way, incredibly beautiful. Arty-farty, the snapper thought. All high fucking cheekbones and flared bloody nostrils. Then, of course, there was the voice. The accent: what Lavender Allcock-Hopkins described as multiply orgasmic.
The snapper looked back through his telephoto. Mik’s eyes were so dark you could barely see the definition between pupil and iris. There was a soft dent above his top lip and a small scar near his left eyebrow.
‘I don’t know what they all bloody see in him,’ he announced to anyone within earshot. He looked back again. There was a locket hanging around Mik’s neck, a plain silver one, nestling just along the watermark where the chest hairs started. Lockets weren’t in that season – everybody knew that. Press-prattle had it that it held something dear to Mik – something even that cold-hearted bastard cherished as a memento.
A body moved in front of Mik, blocking the snapper’s view, and he swore under his breath. He looked up to see who it was. Another photographer. It looked as though the prat was going to ask for a bloody autograph. The shame of the concept turned the snapper’s face scarlet.
A car backfired. Twice. Mik’s hair seemed to explode with the shock, rising up behind his head in serene and stately slow motion. The crush of bodies parted like the Red Sea. Mik stood alone now, frozen in grey space. The thought flashed through the snapper’s mind that maybe the pack had given up at last. Maybe a sense of the injustice of it all had finally permeated their crusty skulls. Mik had no talent as a photographer. He’d screwed his way to the top. He couldn’t tell a Nikon from a Box Brownie if his life depended on it. The game was up: the pack had rejected Mik Veronsky and all his hype.
The snapper watched with glee as Mik disintegrated with the lights of the press no longer upon him. People moved further back. Mik lurched towards them. He looked startled and amazed at their apparent lack of interest. His mouth opened and he screamed a name: ‘Andreas!’ There was an echo from other empty streets. Nonsense. Crap. The guy was all to pieces. Then the word was replaced by something else – something dark that spewed out of his mouth, splattering the bystanders. People moved back quickly in disgust, checking their clothes, wiping stains off their anoraks. All you could hear now was the shuffling and squeaking of Timberlands on wet pavement. There were a couple of screams, too.
Mik seemed to trip over nothing and began to fall, crumpling onto the concrete without a sound. Silence after that, total and profound.
Then suddenly the flashes began like applause after a great performance; not a quick volley of shots this time, but a barrage. No gaps between the silver light. The snapper’s mouth fell open but his hands would not move. Something seeped from beneath Mik’s fallen frame, something thicker and darker even than the rain.
The snapper knew then that his moment had come and passed him by: that split atom of a millisecond that fate offers up to everyone at some time in their meaningless little life, the one chance we all get either to make it or not. The photographer had blown it. He could have been famous. He could have been rich.
The moment had been his. He’d had the best view, the best angle, the best picture in his viewfinder. The irony of it was exquisite. Someone cannoned into his back and his camera rolled to the ground. He felt like jumping on it. Mik Veronsky had just been shot and all he’d done was stand there like a dickhead and watch.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
It was good watching her work in the studio. Very good for an hour or two. Then maybe not so good for a while. After ten hours it was a clear descent into hell.
The trouble was, she was a perfectionist and perfect took time. Time cost money. Clients went from mildly nervous to deeply tense to totally, frenetically, bizarrely apeshit. They knew she was slow – everyone in the business knew she was slow – she was famous for it, but very few people knew exactly how slow. That was when the torture began.
Legend had it one client went completely bankrupt by the second day of a shoot. He could have stopped her, of course. He could have stood up there and then and told her that not only had his budget run out half-way through day one, but also that his entire year’s profits were at risk – yet he didn’t, and nobody blamed him. It would have been like stopping Michelangelo mid-brushstroke to explain your cash-flow problem as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Sometimes it was just easier to stock up on the Prozac and sweat it out.
She was rich, famous – she’d made it. Trading on past successes, maybe, but still a big name. Her studio complex was the size of an aircraft hangar and you got agoraphobic just walking round it. Like all true talents, though, she specialized in looking broke.
Watching her work you noticed the round bones of her spine that showed through her faded t-shirt like strung marbles as she hunched over the loaded camera. You saw how her long, wild sun-streaked hair got pushed dismissively back into an old rubber band she got from one of the paper boxes. When she was concentrating she would often pull a strand of hair down from the band to chew.
You heard nothing because she very rarely spoke and if she did it was in a whisper and you couldn’t hear what she said. After a while the soft puff and squeak of her sneakers as she crept almost soundlessly across the varnished floor, moving from pools of light into total darkness, would get on your nerves.
What you saw when you booked her for a shoot was a tall, youngish woman – not ugly, not plain, but not quite beautiful either – in the throes of an intense, all-consuming relationship with a handful of strobe lights and a beaten-up Rolleiflex. What you got was an illicit love affair with light that made you feel like a snoop even to be watching.
At thirty-five she had been at the top of her profession for several years, having hung there precariously owing to a mixture of driven ambition, technical perfection, and perpetual motion. Her name was legendary in the business and even photographers who trashed her work were in awe of her skill and her knowledge. She was not an instinctive worker – her pictures excited by their composition rather than their content.
She would frown all the time when she worked; it was only when she was finished that she would flash the famous grin, but by then you were too emotionally and financially drained to catch it.
The client that day was Japanese. He’d been warned about her working methods but his company was one of the largest in Japan and well up to the financial challenge. Besides, they wanted the best. The guy had foresight. He had a small roll-up bed with him, a portable TV for the Teletext and the number of an excellent local Japanese restaurant that delivered.
An hour after he’d settled behind the set the news of Mik’s shooting had flashed onto CNN and less than an hour after that he was informed his own shoot was in the can. No take-away sushi and no flies on the Futon.
His initial astonishment soon turned to anger, but when he went to speak to the photographer he found her staring into space and completely oblivious to anything around her. She looked so unwell he feared she might have had a stroke, but then the studio manager came to spirit him away and assure him that all was well and the job fairly completed. When he looked back the photographer still hadn’t moved. Maybe it was merely a display of the type of artistic behaviour the Americans were prone to. If the shots were no good he could always sue. But he still wasn’t sure she hadn’t had a stroke or a breakdown.
He bid her farewell and good luck just in case, and was extraordinarily relieved when she finally looked up and smiled and politely wished him the same in almost perfect Japanese.
1 (#ulink_e41ded82-30c6-5c54-bb5f-d05f6a7d45f5)
Budapest 1981
The child was intrigued by a small speck of light that danced away somewhere deep in the heart of the darkness. He had been scared many times before but never so much that it hurt.
He wore a small plastic submarine pinned to the inside of his vest which was a medal for valour given to him by Father Janovsky for beating the shit out of Istvan Gosser, even though the boy had been armed with a knife. The trophy meant nothing today, though. Today his mouth felt like it was full of pitch and his heart was trying to punch its way out of his chest. If he had encountered Istvan Gosser down there in the dark he would have greeted him like a long-lost friend, and meant it, too.
The light squirmed some more. Perhaps it was a ghost – the soul of one of the newly dead. It might even be Andreas. The thought turned the boy’s knees to sponge. The place smelt funny. He wished he were somewhere else, somewhere with proper light. Anywhere. If he could have remembered his prayers he would have said them. Then a door opened from nowhere and he thought he would die from the shock.
The sudden glare startled him. The darkness felt almost better now. Dark was bad but that bright glare was a million times worse. Someone – not a ghost, because ghosts don’t wear rubber aprons and smell of tobacco – pushed past him and the door fell back almost shut again. The boy was quick, though, pushing his fingers between the crack and preventing the door from closing properly, even though it hurt. When the corridor was quiet he prised the door open. Then, with a quick glance around first to check he was unseen, he stepped inside.
The local mortuary was one vast, watery-smelling place that was tiled and lit like a public convenience. The bare bulbs strung in a line overhead made everyone look like a corpse whether they were dead or not. If the boy could have seen his own reflection in a mirror right then he would have made himself jump.
His face was whey-white with guilt and his hair, in contrast, looked black. The lights bleached the grime and dirt on his body so that he looked almost clean and his mouth had shrunk into a slit. It was hard for him to imagine he was above ground in that room. It was harder still for him to imagine he would ever get out of there alive.
There was a noise. There were other people in that long room. The boy fled to hide, scuttling across the floor like a rat.
Joszef Molnar farted and Laszlo Kovacs giggled. It was the echo that made it so funny. Whistling was good for that, too. The corpse that lay between them on a trolley did nothing, of course. Not that you could always rely on a corpse to play dead. Sometimes they moved, sometimes they even sat up – it was something to do with the escaping gasses as they decomposed. Joszef and Laszlo had seen it all in their time.
The corpse was covered in the regulation green rubber sheet but attached to the sheet were two pink balloons and a badly hand-written card that read: ‘Happy Birthday Lisa’.
Lisa Janus was the local pathologist, a great heifer of a woman who was, nevertheless, the nearest thing to a sex object either man was ever likely to meet. They had been courting her half-heartedly for over a decade and the smell of Lysol was now like an aphrodisiac to them both.
As they heard her galoshes squeaking down the dark labyrinth of outer corridors both men assumed appropriately sober expressions. The aprons they wore covered their police uniforms and that was a shame, but it was the rules. Molnar cleared his throat in readiness and Kovacs licked at his moustache to make it neat. Not that it needed further neatening; he’d spent fifteen minutes on it already that morning, trimming it into a straight line with his wife’s toenail clippers.
Lisa Janus was not an ugly woman, although she could have been taken for one as her face puckered with annoyance at the sight of the two policemen. Every time those two brought a body in they behaved like fishermen displaying a catch. Then her eyes moved down to the rubber sheet and she noticed the pink balloons for the first time.
‘Is this supposed to be a joke, gentlemen?’
A grin broke out on Inspector Kovacs’s face.
‘Ta-daa!’ He pulled the rubber sheet back with a flourish. The sudden movement caused the corpse’s head to roll to the side and he straightened it quickly.
Lisa Janus let out a gasp and the two men smirked.
‘We thought you’d be impressed,’ Kovacs said. ‘The doctor was keen to get his hands on this one but we saved him for you.’
The body was that of a young man, not more than twenty years old at the most. He was tall and slim but – most of all – he was extremely, outstandingly beautiful. His fair hair lay curled and plastered around his face. His skin had yellowed but it was a clear complexion, showing that he had, at least, eaten good food at some time in his upbringing.
Looking at his slender corpse was like admiring one of the white marble statues in the National Museum. Earlier on, Kovacs had tied a red ribbon around the young man’s penis but then thought he might be taking the joke too far and removed it. Molnar had been disappointed at that – he had thought the red ribbon a hilarious touch.
‘Who is he?’ Janus asked. She was impressed. Her voice had shrunk to a whisper.
Molnar shrugged. ‘Who knows? Lowlife. We found him collapsed in the street. No one has missed him – can you imagine that? What a loss to womankind, eh?’
‘Someone might miss him,’ Kovacs said. He twisted the corpse’s arm a little. ‘Look.’ The name Paulina was tattooed on the white forearm. ‘I should imagine this proves he had at least one girlfriend.’
‘It might be the name of his mother.’ Janus leant closer, fingering the tattoo gently.
‘Can you work out what he died of?’
Lisa Janus tutted softly. ‘Drugs,’ she said, ‘he died of an overdose.’ There was no question in her voice.
The two men shared a quick glance over her head.
‘No.’ Inspector Kovacs sounded equally sure. ‘No drugs, Dr Janus.’
‘How can you tell?’ She sounded tired rather than angry.
‘No syringe nearby, no needle marks. I checked. The boy is clean. He must have had a weak heart, or a fit, or something.’
The pathologist gazed at him. Her eyes were a watery shade of hazel. Brown eyes. That meant she was not a true blonde. That meant …
‘Would you be prepared to risk money on your theory, inspector?’ she asked.
Kovacs sucked in his top lip. A bet? That was different.
‘Look.’ Janus leant forward and the men leant forward too, because her overall had gaped a little at the top. There was a sweepstake back at the station over whether she wore underwear beneath her gown or not. Confident of a captive audience, she held the corpse’s upper arm with both hands and squeezed. To the policemen’s amazement a tiny teardrop of red blood appeared at the inner elbow.
‘No apparent needle marks,’ Janus said. ‘He used a sharp syringe and most likely he was not an actual junkie. I suspect I could do the same trick with the other arm. He probably injected heroin in one and cocaine in the other. I believe they call it a Speedball in the United States. I dare say the heroin was too pure. There is a batch doing the rounds at the moment. We had a similar death in here last week.’ She smiled then, for the first time that day. ‘Never take appearances for granted, inspector,’ she said, ‘they can easily be deceptive, you know.’
‘He didn’t use drugs! He wasn’t a junkie!’ Anger had overcome the young boy’s fear and guilt and he stepped out into the full glare of the light for the first time. They all turned to see who had spoken. For a second they looked shocked. He stared at the adults’ faces; for a while they appeared guilty, then they started to look angry too.
He had a round, shining face, like an angel, and his eyes were swollen with tears. His nose was running because he had not dared to move in order to wipe it. His clothes were clean enough – cleaner than him, at any rate – but they were old clothes, well out of style, and looked strange, somehow not right. The policemen tried to gauge the boy’s age. Kovacs guessed eleven and Molnar thought maybe twelve. They knew his sort straight away; the streets were running with them in parts of the city. Lisa Janus did not know his type. She thought he just looked very young and very sad.
‘What are you up to, son?’ Molnar asked. He had three kids of his own at home and they all got up to tricks but none of them would have been stupid enough to hang around a mortuary for fun. Then he noticed the boy was shaking with fear.
‘I was sent here,’ the boy said. ‘I came to identify …’ He pointed to the corpse on the trolley in front of them.
‘You know this lad?’ Kovacs asked.
The boy nodded slowly. ‘He’s my brother.’
Even in the bright lights he could see the policeman blush. Kovacs looked down at the balloons. He prayed the boy was lying.
‘How can you tell?’ he asked. Perhaps he was lying. After all, he could barely see from where he stood.
‘I can smell him,’ the boy said. ‘I can smell his cologne. I could even smell it in the corridor. That was why I came in here. I knew he was here. I found him myself. He’s my brother. I would know him from his smell. He’s dead, isn’t he?’ He tried hard but his voice broke on these last words. Until you say it you don’t have to believe it. Now he had said it. Andreas was dead.
Molnar and Kovacs looked at each other.
‘How long have you been standing there?’ Lisa Janus asked the boy.
‘A few minutes. Before you arrived.’
The pathologist tugged the balloons off the sheet and threw them in the policemen’s faces.
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ she whispered. ‘At least let him come and see if he’s right, poor little fellow.’
Kovacs motioned the boy forward. He had to stand on tiptoe to see the body properly. The policemen stood back, their faces grave. Then the boy leant across and kissed the corpse full on the mouth.
