Stark (22 page)

104: CRASH

C
hrissy had now assembled what could perhaps be called the beginnings of a case. She was in a position to prove that some of the richest people in the world appeared to be slowly dumping their shares and pulling out of traditional areas of investment. As a financial analyst she could demonstrate that this was very strange behaviour and contrary to the interests of those involved. She was also able to prove that this same group of individuals, who were rivals in business and had no particular record of friendship, had all met together for dinner in Los Angeles. What’s more, there were firm indications that a similar but partially different group had met later in Singapore. Finally, she could point out that her colleague, Linda Reeve, who had first picked up on the issue, and perhaps unwisely had allowed those she was trailing to know of her interest, had been murdered. No one knew by whom but the circumstantial evidence seemed to be mounting up.

That was her case, something and nothing. What to do next?

Chrissy was sitting speculating on this question, trying to come up with even one course of action apart from confronting those involved, which she firmly believed would mean her death. The only idea she could think of was taking her story to the CIA or the FBI. But who could be trusted? Anyone? And would they be interested? After all, even she didn’t have the faintest idea what was behind it all. What’s more, even though the sums involved were colossal, they had not yet reached the level for real mischief. It was the potential in this unholy alliance that she feared.

The morning that Chrissy was thinking about this, all over New York people began to fly. They began to fly downwards, because they had lost everything.

For this was the morning that the bottom dropped out of the market. This was the morning on which were recorded the largest single price drops in history. It was a Thursday. A Thursday that came to be known as ‘Oh my God we’re all going to starve to death Thursday.’

All over the world prices were plummeting and so were distraught financiers. The Stark consortium had made its move.

105: WELCOME TO THE PLEASURE DOME

C
D could feel it two streets away, coming up through his trouser legs even through the floor of the car, like someone was playing bass drum on the soles of his feet.

He shifted his position with what he believed to be a funky little movement. He clicked his fingers and the Zippo came alive in his hand. He lit up as if the world was watching him. Shielding the smoke against an imaginary wind, he pulled at it with an expression that suggested here was a man who was only really at home doing his stuff in bed, or doing his stuff on the dance floor. Another snap of the fingers and the Zip was dead. CD pocketed it. He knew he was looking good. Very good.

The reason for this excess of joie de vivre was that CD was filled with a delicious confidence. He knew where he was going and he knew what to expect when he got there. This time he would be hunting in a jungle he knew. At the Old Sydney he had penetrated a strange and dangerous world. A world filled with people whose dreams and expectations were very different to his own. War, pain and inflicting degradation were not CD’s ideas of good fantasy fodder. Gordon Gordon’s little world had been one that CD had entered with fear and reluctance. He had done it purely for the love of Rachel, that she would be proud of him and that maybe, just maybe, she would grant him access to her body; the single thing on earth which fascinated him most and was yet totally and entirely out of reach. An unknown country from which any traveller who returned would, in CD’s opinion, be out of their minds. Tonight, though, was different. He was on the same mission; to discover why a bunch of Perth Nazis had travelled five hundred miles to beat up black people. He was doing it for the same reason; in an attempt to prove worthy of and hence to win the love of the exquisite Rachel. But besides all that, CD reckoned it should be fun. He was strutting up town to shake his booty down to the ground and get down on it like the bitchin’ motivatin’ groove machine he knew himself to be.

106: DICKHEADS ARE NEWS

I
t had not taken a very great deal of painstaking research for CD to pick up on the trail of Aristos Tyron. He was the kind of tedious git who turned up regularly in the gossip columns in sad identikit photos of the week’s ‘top parties’. CD found seven in just three weeks’ worth of back numbers of the Perth Daily News. On close examination the pictures were definitely of different functions but, in fact, the editor might just as well have saved on the reporter’s taxi fare and published the same photograph over and over, so similar were they. There he was, that gormless face, crushed in amongst other gormless faces. Bow ties and necklaces, arms about each others shoulders, huge fat mouths agape, apparently roaring with laughter at some fab elite gag that the poor, dull reader could never be a part of. All the photos suggested the same thing, that there exists somewhere a world where people are having the wildest sort of time pretty much constantly.

People have a tendency to presume that they are missing out on something. That they are missing out on some sort of key. A key to providing a better time than they are capable of providing for themselves. The other man’s grass is astro-turf and it’s better.

This is what gossip pages in newspapers depend on. They suggest that there is a mystical, club-centred world of pop stars and society beauties where a better time is being had. It is a strange theory, after all, there is no reason to presume that you will have a better time simply because you are standing about with a bunch of wankers and paying ten bucks for an orange juice.

But the photos suggest that there is. Those screaming faces that CD had looked at in the Carlo library; fat men, anorexic looking women. Those faces were saying, ‘look at us, you’ll never enjoy yourself this much.’

The photos do not record the event, they are the event. The photo is what matters, all that matters. As long as the photos are published, it’s irrelevant what it was actually like in whichever pathetically fashionable disco they were taken.

Of course, those gormless, screaming fashion clones didn’t actually have a better time than is had down at the local pub. But they pretended that they did, because that way, despite all the bordeom and the expense, there is a certain satisfaction, the satisfaction of being envied, of believing oneself to be special.

Getting your photo in the paper justifies any mind- numbingly stupid occupation. Ask a football thug.

107: DISCO DOWN

C
D loved it and he was really looking forward to his visit to The Shelter. The previous year, The Shelter had been called Hobo’s and had been decorated with images of the great depression, tramps, breadlines, unemployed marchers, etc. Now it had been radically redesigned to represent nuclear Armageddon; huge mushroom clouds; flights of missiles; mock-ups of newspapers announcing World War Three, that kind of thing. The girls wore little costumes that glowed and banged on fluorescent tambourines.

‘Party like there’s no tomorrow’ was written over the bar, which translated as ‘please spend all of your money as quickly as you possibly can.’

CD had prepared his entrance carefully. He knew enough to know that, despite the efforts clubs like The Shelter make at exclusivity, they are there to make money. That is what the bouncers are trained to watch out for: money, or more importantly, the lack of it. ‘Let the money in,’ the manager would say to a new caveman in a bow tie. ‘Let the money in and let the tit in, because tit attracts money, all right? No paupers, and no dogs.’

But, looking like money is actually only a question of confidence. You can hire what is termed a ‘luxury car’ from a cab hire firm, for much the same price as an ordinary car. An extra 30 per cent gets you a nice Mercedes and a bloke with a hat.

CD had insisted on pre-paying for the journey which added a touch to the price, but it meant when he pulled up outside the club he could jump out immediately, shouting over his shoulder, ‘Listen, Frank, take some time out, I’ll get Janine to bleep you if I need wheels.’

CD turned to the bruiser in the bow tie.

‘Hi, I’m here to meet Aristos, Aristos Tyron. Is he in yet? Hey, who cares? I hear this is the sort of place it’s fun to wait around in.’

As it happens, CD needn’t have tried quite so hard. There are about fifteen ‘top’ night-clubs competing for the city’s night-clubbing business, and despite the manager’s efforts, exclusivity was a bit of a myth really. Most places would let you in if you could afford a plastic bomber jacket, and, of course, are happy to pay the entrance fee.

CD paid it, but he wasn’t happy. Twenty-five dollars was considerably more than he expected, they must have been charging by the decibel. As he walked into the flickering darkness, the sound hit him like a sweat-soaked brick. The lights flashed and scurried about the floor, walls and ceiling. An epileptic would not have made it through the door.

The SAS in Northern Ireland have long been working on a non-violent interrogation technique called sensory deprivation. The idea is that they subject the suspect to blinding lights and a confusion of high volume ‘white’ noise that so disorientates them they will divulge anything. As CD felt his way around the Shelter, he could not help feeling that the SAS could have just paid the twenty-five dollars admission and sat the suspect at the cocktail bar. CD had been nursing a mineral water for about half an hour when Aristos arrived. CD introduced himself immediately as a journo from a London based trend mag called Groovy Trousers, which had recently won an award for the best laid out feature on whether Elvis is dead or not to be published that month. Aristos, being of course a complete media and fashion victim, had heard of it and ordered champagne. One of the signs of a club dickhead is somebody who does not say ‘would you like a drink?’ but asks ‘would you like a glass of champagne?’

This is rendered even sadder in Australia because their superb wine-making industry has come up with many excellent champagnes that are similar to the French stuff in all but two vital areas. They do not come from Champagne, and they cost about the same as an ordinary bottle of wine. Hence an Aussie club dickhead wishing to gain the same effect (for what it’s worth) that his European dickhead brother gets by asking ‘would you like a glass of champagne?’ has to ask, ‘would you like a glass of French champagne?’ Which of course translates as:

‘I want you to know that I am quite deliberately paying forty bucks for something I could get for eight and which we will both swill down like we don’t know we’re drinking it.’

The French have long been involved in expensive legislation in order to stop the Aussies calling their wine ‘champagne’ and getting them to call it a ‘champagne type fizzy wine’ which, legally, they have a right to insist upon. So far, however, the Australian attitude seems to have been, ‘OK, so invade us’. Hence, at the time of writing, it was possible to purchase an entire twelve bottle case of Great Western champagne for the price of a bottle of Moet and Chandon. Not surprisingly, people get quite pissed at Australian weddings.

As it turned out though, all the French efforts at a ‘fair go’ were soon to become irrelevant and the Australians and Californians were going to get the whole shooting match to themselves. The reason for this was that as Aristos Tyron was offering CD French champagne, thirteen thousand miles away in France in a little place about equidistance between the areas of Champagne and Cognac — two tiny districts that have given the world so much pleasure — in one of the numerous French nuclear power stations, a small, unseen hairline fracture was beginning to grow and was soon to render not one drop of French wine drinkable for at least a decade. Nor most of German wine, and Spanish and a great deal of Italian-British wine of course had never been drinkable in the first place. So Aristos and CD sat in the mindless noise and light, shouting at the top of their voices to make themselves heard, swigging on a drink that was about to become a real world rarity. Both of them would have preferred a beer.

Screaming himself hoarse, CD bullshitted for half an hour or so about the celebs he was lined up to meet in Sydney and those he had just left in London. It is not difficult to convince somebody who wants to believe and, of course, Aristos desperately wanted to believe that an important and trendy journo was going to do an ‘in depth’ on him.

‘Can we go somewhere a little more private, Mr Tyron?’ CD suggested when he realized that his eye was wandering onto the dance floor where gangs of girls, rendered infinitely beautiful by the near darkness, were doing their funky stuff.

‘Hey,’ said Aristos, ‘how many times do I have to say. It’s Aristos, OK?’

‘Oh yeah, sorry Aristos.’ CD lit his cigarette like he was in a high wind and stared at Aristos through the smoke. ‘You have a great attitude, you know that? Most of the big guys treat us media punks like shit. Oh, sure, they want the copy, they want the column inches. Yeah, they want all that. But, the guy putting the hours in, the man with the pen, he can go fuck himself. It’s Mr Jagger, and Mr Bowie, even the politicians won’t unwind, and who needs them.’

‘Well, you know, Colin, I like you,’ a delighted Aristos replied with massive condescension. ‘Sure Mick and David can be brusque, but it’s tough for them too you know?’ Aristos had done it again. No matter how much a person heard about Aristos, until they met him, they could never fully comprehend just how big a pratt he was.

‘Yeah, I know it’s tough being a tall poppy like Jagger or Bowie,’ said CD, sucking his cigarette and talking as if they were discussing a couple of war veterans deserving of very special consideration, instead of two immensely rich and hugely envied people. Affecting sympathy for the super- fortunate and their goldfish bowl life-styles is one way of dealing with the horrendous jealousy everyone feels for them.

‘Hey, let’s get up the celebrity bar, and have some more French champagne. It’s OK, I can get you in,’ said Aristos.

Most large discos have a thing they call a celebrity bar. This is where local models, local football players and the managers’ girlfriends go.

Aristos walked in casually, nodding towards CD ‘Friend of mine,’ he said to a waitress in a tutu who had not been going to ask. The music was about ten decibels quieter and they were able to talk, just.

‘Listen,’ said CD deciding he had better get the job done before his ears started bleeding. ‘My editor wants me to get right behind the enigma that is Aristos Tyron. Your brother is a hugely successful man. Now we’ve been searching around, playing a hunch that you have a little bit more to do with that success than either of you lets on. Is that right?’

‘Well…‘ said Aristos, because he didn’t know what else to say.

‘You know, I’m getting a picture here,’ CD continued. ‘Not the one that you and your brother want the world to see, but the picture behind the picture. Suppose Ocker Tyron needed a man to deal for him when he couldn’t be personally involved. A man he had complete confidence in. Who better than the guy everybody thought was just a good time boy? A ladies’ man? The fellah they all wrote off as just another fascinating, hard drinking, good lookin’ sexual animal? Who better than Aristos Tyron, to be the liaison?’

Aristos could hardly believe his ears, this journalist was a genius. CD had lucked out in a big way. His casual use of the word ‘liaison’ had convinced Aristos that he deserved the description that CD was constructing — it was just what Ocker had called him.

‘That’s it. I’m his liaison, the silent right hand.’

CD flattered him some more and allowed him to order more French champagne. ‘What kind of situation would you liaise in, then, Aristos? I mean, no names, no pack drill, but just an idea.’

‘Woah! Woah there!’ said Aristos with jolly, patronizing good nature. ‘You don’t think I’m going to spill me and my brother’s business moves to the press, do you? Ha ha, I’m no fool, Colin. Have another drink.’

‘Hey,’ CD assured him, ‘listen, you start doing that and I’m outta here anyway. Wow, that is big league stuff. I’ll leave it to you, Aristos. What I don’t know won’t hurt me, right?’

‘Right,’ said Aristos with enthusiasm. He absolutely loved CD by this time.

‘Besides,’ continued CD soothingly, ‘this is a fashion spread, remember. The sheep reading this, all the good- looking girls and that, they don’t want to know the details, they wouldn’t understand them…What they need is a kind of broad example, just a vague hint of what the big men get up to.’ CD was gambling that Aristos would not have the wit to invent an example and would, instead, merely describe a real one and try to be non-specific. He was right.

‘Well, you know,’ said a drunken Aristos, ‘supposing somebody wanted some people leant on, not hard you understand, but persuaded, and he didn’t want to get involved. Well then, his liaison might find some people to help out.’

CD was so close he decided to take a calculated risk.

‘But what on earth would he want in Bullens Creek?’ he asked.

‘Well, you know, it could be —’ Aristos was suddenly nervous. ‘What do you mean? What about Bullens Creek?’

‘I said we’d been scratching around, Aristos,’ CD decided to go for it, ‘and after I talked to the White Supremacy lot…‘ Finally Aristos began to wonder about this total stranger whom he had been buying drinks for. ‘Look, what’s going on? I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you want to know?’

‘Nothing.’ CD was having one last chance at being soothing but he guessed the game was up. ‘I just want to know why Tyron got you to send those Nazis to beat up the Aboriginals.’

‘He didn’t! He just asked me to —’ suddenly, from some unknown part of Aristos’ brain, a smidgeon of native cunning forced its way through his cotton wool brain. He called the manager and demanded a security guard while he hissed at CD, ‘I never said a thing to you, mate, and if you say I did, even in the Sheep Breeders’ Gazette, I’ll sue you into oblivion.’

Aristos could not have found a better way of confirming absolutely everything that CD had come to find out. The guard arrived.

‘I think this man has my wallet,’ Aristos said. ‘I don’t want a scene, just turn out his pockets.’

The man did as he was told. CD didn’t mind, his mission had been a complete success.

‘No wallet, sir,’ said the guard.

‘And no tape recorder,’ Aristos said in triumph. ‘You’ve got nothing, mate. Throw him out.’