‘Top Trumps?’
‘Harriet’s already started cutting the smaller investors out of the picture. Prince Faquit’s just inked four-point-five over oysters at Non. You can’t believe how easy it is to get money from people for film. As long as it’s an incredibly large amount, that is. Indies can’t cover the grip’s fucking pizza.’
‘You did tell her about me, didn’t you, Declan?’ Violet asked, having assumed that for the last few seconds I’d decided to drop into an African language.
‘Yes.’
‘No, but I mean you did, didn’t you?’
‘I’ve told you. Eve.’
Violet, sitting with legs crossed and one stiletto hanging off her toes, just went very still. Very present.
‘Don’t fuck about with me, Declan,’ she said.
I put my hand on her knee. ‘It’s not my call,’ I said. ‘I mean I’m not the casting director. They’ve got Hagar Hefflefinger, you know. She’s very tough. Very good. Tough in a good way. Good in a tough way. The way casting directors have to be. So like I say, it’s not my call. But it is my script – how would you feel about Salome, by the way?’
‘Who?’
‘Herod’s daughter. A princess. Redhead, too, you know, so I was thinking, obviously.’
‘I knew you were lying.’
‘What?’
‘About the Eve part. You know I’m not a complete fucking idiot.’
Violet’s nothing if not a quick assimilator. Initially, news of my restored Rodge was greeted with a dimpled smile and a dash to the disgorged boudoir, where my girl administered fellatio of such froth and dalliance that my eyebrows, raised at its commencement, refused to come down until it was all over. (Watching in the mirror turned out to be a bad idea, what with Gunn’s wayward gut and hairy legs, what with his double chin, dugs, and jug-handle ears, what with his body being a sort of anti-aphrodisiac – until, that is, I started seeing the pornographic potential in our aesthetic discrepancies . . .) But she’s sharp. She’s already started rationing her favours. The splurge was to establish that her currency was still good. Already, in the absence of an Actual Meeting With the Producer and the Director, she’s reined in her spending.
‘Violet,’ I said. ‘Violet. If it was up to me – but listen. Listen. I’m not the casting director, but I am having that consultation clause written in. Harriet’s getting the contracts drafted this week. But casting director or not – Hagar fucking Hefflefinger or not – Trent Bintock is the director of this film and Trent Bintock thinks I’m a creative genius. If I tell him we need to look at you for Eve – if I tell him we need to look at you for Eve . . . Do you hear what I’m saying?’
There had almost been tears. The jewelled eyes had filled up. She closed them, now, for three, four, five seconds, breathing slowly through her nostrils.
‘Do you know who Harriet wants for Lucifer?’ I said. ‘Do you know who she was on the phone to last night?
Violet opened her eyes. We were in a familiar place now. I was the dad who’d frightened her – for her own good – and now, chastened, she was looking at me ready to be rescued from fear.
‘Johnny Depp,’ I said, quietly, then took a sip of my drink and looked out of the window.
She put her head down for a moment of introspective silence. When she looked up again, she wore a compact almost a bitter – smile.
‘We’ve earned this, Declan,’ she said. ‘D’you know what I mean? We’ve fucking earned this.’
There’s a common misconception about me. It’s a slander spread by the Church, namely that if you make a deal with me, I’ll cheat you. Poppycock, of course. I never cheat. Never have to. Ask Robert Johnson. Ask Jimmy Page. Humans are so deaf and blind to the ambiguities of their own languages, they concoct their wishes in terms so permeable that I can always grant them in a way they never imagined. I want to be as wealthy as my father. Fair enough. Nelchael crashes the markets, Dad’s bankrupt, and thanks for the soul, brother. A boneheaded example, obviously, but you’d be surprised how wide open you leave yourselves. (The punters who come off best with me are smart, dirty rotten scoundrels to start with, willing to sign over their afterlife care in exchange for the chance to become even dirtier, rottener scoundrels while still rightside of the grave.)
Any of these transactions is a no-lose situation for me. Even if you get your deal double-entendre-proof, even if, thanks to you dressing your heart’s desire in a semantic straitjacket, I’m compact-bound to give you what you want, still, at the end of an incredibly short time (all New Time’s short time to me), I’m going to get my hands on your soul. How can I put this? You really don’t want that to happen.
You might be one of the genuinely smart and dirty rotten scoundrels mentioned above, whose wish coincides with my overall design. You might, for example, want control over people’s minds, financial muscle, immunity from prosecution, access to kids, a personal harem, etc. Now if you really are smart, if I think you’ve got it in you, I might just slot you into a System. I’ll make you a media tycoon, or a dictator, or a cult leader, or a porn baron, or a drug tsar. As long as your evil’s got some scale, as long as it draws others in, and as long as you’re prepared to put in a bit of good old-fashioned graft – well, you’ll get what you wanted, the fame, the charisma, the wedge, the place in history, the six-year-olds, whatever. You get your kicks, I get a System operator, the Old Man gets a migraine, and – thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you? – I get your soul when you die.
So let the holy fathers prattle of lies and betrayals. Truth is I’m no welcher.
I have been done over once, mind you – a wretched Spaniard by the name of Don Fernando Morrales, not long before the close of the gorgeous sixteenth century. This young man was a piece of work. The only son of wealthy parents he spent the first years of his adult life racing through his fortune on an extraordinary diet of booze, whores and gambling. Built up quite a reputation for blasphemous debauches and criminal orgies. A natural, as they say. I gave him the odd nudge now and again when guilt tickled or imagination flagged, but by and large he was a works-well-on-his-own-initiative kind of sinner. To be honest with you I didn’t think he’d see twenty-five, what with the poxy scags and verminous rent boys into which he was dipping his redoubtable chorizo, not to mention the growing number of hacked-off dads whose daughters he’d rather irresponsibly impregnated; but, incredibly, he just kept on rocking in the free world until the money was gone. Now, as any suddenly blinded peeping tom will aver, the flames of desire burn with twice the fierceness in the absence of the means of gratification – and so it was with young Morrales, until finally I decided to drop in, make a deal, put him once and for all beyond the reach of redemption and his scrofulous soul into the infernal account.
I’ve looked back since and known that I must have been in a funny mood. It was a bad pain day, yes – sometimes I can barely manage the raised eyebrow and devilish grin – but something else, too . . . A shade of melancholy, perhaps? A sense that my best days were behind me? That the challenging work had already been done? (Foolish, in hindsight, given my achievements of the last 400 years, but I’m prone to moments of doubt just like everyone else. And I’m not talking little or nagging doubt. I’m talking crippling, existential, what-on-earth-is-the-point-of-it-all doubt. There have been days when I’ve just had to lie in a darkened room.) Anyway the point is that for whatever reason I wasn’t quite myself when I visited Morrales in the ritual room of one of his occult amigos, who, at Morrales’s insistence, had gone to the bogus and completely unnecessary trouble of’summoning’ me. Do please note those inverted commas, to signify facetiousness. You don’t, darling, ‘summon’ Lucifer. He’s not a fucking butler. Lucifer visits you. That’s all. If I feel it’s going to be in my interest to have direct dealings with you (and you really better hope I don’t) then I’ll come whether you attempt to ’summon’ me or not. If I don’t, no amount of spooky chanting, bare bums, sinister beards, fellated goats or murdered chickens is going to make the slightest difference, except to your carpet. Don’t get me wrong: you’ll have a blast. It just doesn’t work.