For The Death Of Me (2 page)

So, anyway . . . as my mother always chided me for saying . . . there I was, sat in front of our private, well-guarded, multi-million-euro villa, watching the big blue boat and suddenly feeling relatively poor. Only relatively, though: I might not own an oil company, but I'd hit eight figures per movie and there aren't too many of us do that. I'd just finished the third of a trio of projects that Roscoe Brown, my agent, had negotiated for me a year before, and we had reached the stage where we were turning down more work than we were accepting. I'll tell you how big I've become: people are stopping Keanu Reeves in the street and asking if he's me, rather than the other way round. (I believe it pisses him off mightily.)

I'd earned a couple of months' break and I was looking forward to it, to a holiday with the whole family, maybe the last unfettered time we'd have together before Janet started proper school and we were hit by its limitations. My film schedule was fixed for a year ahead, but I wasn't due back in California until mid-September, two months distant. When I went back to work, it would be for Miles Grayson, my mentor and one-time in-law. He had picked up the rights to a boxing movie and wanted me in the lead, opposite his wife, Dawn Phillips, Prim's sister. Miles had decided that he was through with acting: he had recognised what the rest of us in the business had known for a while, that he was much better in the director's chair. The part meant I had to keep myself in good physical condition, but that's part of my normal routine. Every one of my homes has a gym. (Spoiled bastard, eh?)

I looked away from the Big Blue with not a trace of envy . . . Oz is not into boats . . . and laid wee Jonathan gently on the seat next to me, taking care not to wake him as I covered him with a towel. I stepped out into the sun and dived into the sparkling pool, so cleanly that Susie didn't hear me until I surfaced behind her, clamping myself on to her flotation devices.

‘G'roff.' She chuckled. ‘The kids are watching.'

‘No, they're not. They're too busy piloting their big green crocodile. Anyway, it's good for them to see Mummy and Daddy happy.'

‘Happy's one thing, Daddy fondling Mummy's tits is something else.' She turned and slipped her arms round my neck. I felt myself harden.

‘Let's take it indoors, then.'

She kissed me and I felt her harden too. I love Susie's nipples. They're big and red, like cherries that are trying their best to become strawberries. ‘Is this what I'm in for all the next two months?' she murmured.

‘If you play your cards right.'

‘Excuse me!' A voice came from the doorway, across the terrace.

Having a live-in nanny is one of the privileges of wealth, but I can understand that people might think it brings privacy problems. I suppose it might, but not when the nanny in question is Ethel Reid. She's the soul of discretion, a fountain of wisdom, and a hell of a laugh to boot. She's taken our new lifestyle in her stride, the kids love her, and so do we.

‘Lunchtime for the wee ones,' she called out, walking carefully across the tiles to pick up Jonathan, as Janet and Tom scrambled out of the pool. ‘The big ones can look after themselves.'

That suited us. Normally we eat as a family whenever we can, but that day Susie and I had a lunchtime appointment. The approach had come out of the blue, when I was in Spain, mid-way through Minghella's Quixote movie; it wasn't made via Roscoe, but direct to me, and it was from a novelist. He'd done some on-line research, found out where I was and had got in touch through the production company. The guy's name was Benedict Luker; he sent me a copy of his newly published work, Blue Star Falling, and invited me, in a very roundabout way, to read it and tell him what I thought. I get a fair amount of stuff like that and, to be brutal about it, most of it is recycled on the instant, but there was something about this guy's pitch that made me treat it differently. It was probably the letter that did it: I still have it.

 
Yes, it was the letter; after that, how could I not look at it? Whoever this guy was, he'd managed to throw my switch. Besides, I had no scripts to consider, I'd exhausted my reading pile, and it's bloody difficult to find English-language novels in a village in Extremadura that's not all that far from the back of beyond.

It wasn't the longest or most challenging book I'd ever read, but it got me hooked nonetheless. It seemed to be Luker's first novel; it was a fast-action off-beat whodunit, in which the author was, curiously, his own leading character. I'd encountered something like it before, but for the life of me I couldn't remember where. It was the kind of book that looks as if it's meant to be read in bed, just before the light goes out, but if you do, you find yourself awake all night, or at least until it's finished.

When it was, and when Luker the private-eye hero had caught the bad guys, and the Blue Star, which turned out to be a fist-sized diamond, just before it fell into an industrial crusher that would have turned it into a thousand twinkles, I wrote to him, at the New York post-office box address he'd provided. I told him it was the best yarn I'd encountered in a long time and that I couldn't think of a good reason not to read it.

A week later, I received a second letter.

 
 
Actually, I could think of many excellent reasons. I'm an actor, not a producer. I may be a success in the movie business, but I know eff all about virtually all of it. Finding writers, a director, casting, putting a crew together, choosing locations, handling the logistical problems, many of them totally unpredictable: I'd seen it all done, but I hadn't a bloody clue how to do any of it.

But I knew a man who had.

I sent Luker a one-sentence holding reply, ‘I'm trying to think of one,' then called my ex in-law and asked him to get hold of a copy of the book. When I told him why I wanted him to read it, Miles questioned my mental condition but said he would. He called me back two days later, all business, and said, ‘Okay, here's what you do. I'll come in fifty-fifty on a three-year option and if it gets as far as production we can run it through my company, as long as you agree to play the lead and I get to direct. And don't offer him much money, a hundred thousand dollars tops, and remember, it's an option to produce and the money's an advance against future income.'

I understood most of that, or at least enough to write to Luker and invite him to meet me in Monaco once I was clear of other commitments. He agreed and we set up a lunch meeting in the rooftop grill of the Hôtel de Paris, in Casino Square. I looked down on it as we climbed out of the pool, then checked my watch. ‘Christ,' I said to Susie, ‘we've only got half an hour.'

She smiled up at me, and those cherries seemed to wink. ‘Well, ain't that too damn bad,' she said.

2

We were twenty minutes behind schedule when we set out for the Hôtel de Paris, and even then, Susie's hair was still damp. She had included herself in the meeting because she had read the book and enjoyed it and, as she put it, because there was no way in this lifetime that I was going to lunch in the H de P without her.

We'd only have been fifteen minutes late if the phone hadn't rung, and if Audrey Kent hadn't been in the toilet. But it did, and she was, so I picked it up.

‘Oz, it's you.'

I knew that voice; by God, did I know it. ‘Last time I looked in the mirror it was,' I told Primavera. ‘Which of your diverse personalities is on the other end of the line, and where the hell are you?'

‘I'm me,' she replied. ‘The concerned mother missing her son.'

‘Not the devious tramp on a mission to ruin my life?'

‘Not this time.'

Prim and I had had a little difficulty a year or so before. She had been a very silly girl, and had paid various penalties, including a six-month prison term, and loss of custody of our son. I knew which had hurt her the most.

I had seen her once since she'd been inside, when we'd been at Loch Lomond and she'd come to visit Tom. Susie would have been behaving reasonably if she'd raised hell about that, since she'd been as much a potential victim of Prim's failed scam as I had, but she's as generous a woman as I've ever known, and she'd forgiven her. Guilt came into it, maybe: the early stage of our relationship, Susie's and mine, was more than a little adulterous.

‘So, I repeat,' I went on, ‘where the fuckaya? We're short for time here.'

‘I'm in Monte Carlo.' Why was I not surprised by that? Because I knew Prim too well, that's why: she'd lost her ability to set me off balance. ‘I've checked into the Columbus, and I'd like to see Tom.'

‘A little notice would have been nice.'

‘Yes, I know, and I'm sorry.'

Bollocks, I thought. Prim and ‘sorry' were strangers to each other.

‘They only gave me my passport back three days ago, after I finished my probation period. I wasn't a hundred per cent certain that they would, and I didn't want to make an arrangement and then have to disappoint him.'

‘I can accept that,' I told her. ‘But you can't just sweep in unannounced. We agreed that he has to be prepared for each visit. Susie and I are already late for a lunch date; I can't deal with it right now. Tomorrow morning, fine, but not today.'

‘Okay,' she conceded, slightly grumpily. ‘But what am I going to do in the meantime?'

I glanced at Susie; she shrugged her tanned shoulders. ‘Get in a taxi and come to the Hôtel de Paris, Le Grill on the roof. You can have lunch with us, make up a foursome. You might even be amused by it.'

‘I can't just drop everything and come.'

‘Everything, as in what exactly? You were ready to bomb up here and see Tom. Just get your ass' (Gone Hollywood: can't help it) ‘in a taxi and don't argue.' I hung up on her.

Conrad was waiting at the front door in the Mercedes. We have two in Monaco, an S-class for posh stuff like being driven to the Hôtel de Paris, and an M-class, which Susie uses for the supermarket trips. (I've never understood the need for off-road capability in the Intermarché car park, but I'm no expert in such matters.) The Merc is the people's car in the principality. You don't see many BMWs there; someone I know told me that it's because they're seen to have Mafia connotations, but I wouldn't know about that.

He's a smooth driver, the boy, as skilled behind the wheel as he is in everything else he does for us. Conrad (woe betide anyone who ever calls him Connie) doesn't have a job description. Some people think he's my minder, but he isn't, not first and foremost at any rate. I can handle such stuff myself and, besides, it doesn't look good for someone like me to have a well-suited heavy on his shoulder all the time. It takes the gloss off the smile, if you understand me. No, he's there to make sure that the intruder protection systems on all our properties are working, all the time, but first and foremost to look after Susie and the kids. Is he good at that? Well, all I'll say is that when we moved to Monaco and Janet and Tom started nursery school, we had a paparazzi problem, guys following them right up to the gate and even inside. We don't, not any more. I don't know how he solved it, because I never asked, but he did.

The traffic was a little bit hairy, so it took fifteen minutes to reach Casino Square. With a clear run you can cross the principality in five. As we pulled up in front of the hotel, its impressive commissionaire stepped forward, ignoring the taxi that followed us as he seized the door handle. He bowed as we stepped out, greeting us by name . . . we weren't regulars, but such courtesies come with the uniform. I bunged him the usual, took Susie's arm and was about to lead her inside when I heard a call from behind.

‘Hold on!'

We turned, and there was Prim. She'd had no time to posh up, so I suppose she'd been planning to visit Tom in a close-fitting green satin dress that looked as if it had been cut to make the most of her maternal bosom, and in chosen-to-match shoes with three-inch heels. I suppose the poor wee chap might not have recognised her if she hadn't been wearing a touch of blusher and deep red lipstick. She'd looked a bit scrawny when we'd seen her last, but she'd replaced the few pounds she'd lost in the nick, and the lines around her eyes had vanished.

‘Sorry I took so long,' she exclaimed. ‘I thought taxis came on demand here, I had to wait almost ten minutes.' She and Susie embraced, briefly, although I could still read a little tension in my wife's body-language. I gave her a small nod, then stood aside for them to lead the way into the hotel's spectacular foyer.

‘Who's the fourth member?' Prim asked, as we waited for the lift.

I filled her in quickly on Benedict Luker, his book and the bold and zany approach that had led to our lunch date.

‘So you've never met the guy?'

‘No,' I agreed, as the elevator arrived and we stepped inside.

‘You know how old he is?'

‘No. His biog on the book jacket describes him as “an international man of mystery”, and that's all.'

‘Or what he looks like?'

‘There's no photo on the jacket.'