Sandy nodded. “Not a single bark.”
Richmond stood up. “See? Well, you got to excuse me, Mister Blair. Got to take Bal for a walk. Catch you later, right? Hey, what are you doing here anyhow? You going to write us up for the Hog?”
“In a manner of speaking. I’m your new flack.”
“Great!” Richmond said with enthusiasm. “Well, see you at the next rehearsal, then.” He trotted off up the aisle, the dog running at his heels.
Sandy turned to Ananda. “Not if I can help it,” he said. “Christ, the kid thinks his dog is a rock critic! They’re going to tear him to pieces, ’Nanda.”
Ananda’s face was grim, but she didn’t seem to have heard Sandy’s comment. “I have to talk to Edan,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“At the hotel. The Bellevue-Stratford.”
“Let’s go, then,” Sandy said. “I’ve got a few things to say to Morse myself.”
They drove to the hotel in silence. Ananda’s mind was elsewhere, and the rehearsal seemed to have angered her, somehow. Sandy didn’t feel much like talking himself. They pulled up in front and Sandy lugged his suitcase from the hatch. “I’m going to check in,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Morse’s room. What’s the number?”
She told him and headed for the elevators while Sandy went to the desk. It was ten minutes later, after he’d stashed his suitcase in his room and hung up a few of his shirts, that he walked down two flights and knocked on the door of Edan Morse’s suite.
Ananda opened the door for him. She still looked furious, and said nothing. Edan Morse was seated by a window on the other side of the room, looking markedly less Boy-Scoutish than he had in Malibu. He had started to cultivate a beard, and it was coming in dark and full, covering his dimples and the little cleft in his chin. He seemed leaner as well, as if he were losing weight, and there was just the slightest hint of circles under his eyes. A heavy silver pendant with a complex spider-and-snake design hung against his black turtleneck. The brown eyes glittered as he swung to face Sandy. “So. You have elected to join us, then.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Sandy said.
Edan Morse frowned. “If you don’t believe in what we’re doing, why are you here?”
“You tell me. You’re the magic man.”
Morse steepled his hands under his chin and regarded Sandy with those dark brown eyes. “Three possibilities,” he said after a pause. “One, you know this is going to be a hell of a big story, and you want in on it. Two, you wanted into ’Nanda’s pants again. Three, you’re doing it for the money.”
“Four,” Sandy said, “all of the above.”
“And you know what, Blair? I don’t care. As long as you do your job, I could care less about your motivations.”
“Let’s talk about this job I’m supposed to do,” Sandy said. He strode across the room and took the chair opposite Morse. “You just heard about the rehearsal from Ananda, I’d guess. You don’t need a PR man. You need a new band. Maybe you should forget about the Nazgûl and reunite the Beatles instead. Get Paul, George, and Ringo, and make yourself a clever plastic John Lennon. Only make damn sure he can sing better than Larry Richmond.”
“I don’t know any Larry Richmond,” Morse said flatly. “When the time comes, Patrick Henry Hobbins will give the best performance of his life.” He smiled. “Or death. You can count on it.”
Sandy leaned back and made a rude noise. He didn’t do it as well as Froggy, but it got the message across anyway.
“Skepticism is a healthy attitude for a citizen of this pig society,” Morse said, “but you take it too far.”
“I heard them play today,” Sandy snapped. “You didn’t.”
Edan Morse shrugged. “Stay away from the rehearsals, then. You have no business being there in any case. And you have work to do. I want people to know that the Nazgûl are coming back. I want to have excitement, anticipation. I want the audiences to be ready. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” said Sandy, “but…”
“No buts. Do it, Blair. And do it soon. I’ve already set up their first concert. Chicago. The Civic Auditorium. June 12th.”
Sandy frowned. “That’s barely six weeks away,” he said.
“Can’t you do it?”
“I can do it,” he said, “but the Nazgûl can’t. They won’t be ready in six weeks. They might not be ready in six goddamned years, the way they sounded today.”
“They’ll be ready. And it’s not important anyway. This is only a preliminary. There will be other concerts, more crucial ones.”
The way he said it sent a shiver down Sandy’s spine. “I’ve listened to the music,” he said. “That’s what lies behind this all. Music to Wake the Dead. You think it has some kind of, I don’t know, power.”
Edan Morse smiled thinly and said nothing.
“I almost believed you, too. But this afternoon it all fell to pieces. The Rag is only a song.”
“Is it?” Morse asked.
“Yes,” Sandy said. “And the rest of that album came true only because you made it come true. You killed Jamie Lynch, or had Gort do it, or somebody else. Because of the lyrics. Because you’re nuts.”
“Do I have to deny that again? You still don’t understand. What really happened was that Peter Faxon, back in 1971, saw the shape of Lynch’s death and wrote a song about it. You refuse to face the truth. The music made it happen. Or maybe you could say it was fated to happen and the music predicted it. But it was an accident, an accident that fortuitously advanced our cause.”
“And the Gopher Hole fire? Was that another accident?”
“Yes. Part of the pattern.”
“An accident that fortuitously sealed the emergency exits? No, Morse. Someone wanted people to burn in that fire, wanted people to die. Someone who wanted a song to come true, someone who’d bought the delusion that blood has power. And plastic explosive doesn’t accidentally find its way into too many taverns in Camden.”
“Plastic explosive?” Morse shrugged. “Did I deny that it was arson? No. Only that I was the arsonist. I had nothing to do with that fire.”
Ananda had listened in silence to the whole exchange, but now she spoke up. “Edan’s telling the truth,” she said. “I’ve known him a long time and I know what he’s capable of. He’d lie to the man, he’d lie to protect the cause, but he’s straight with our own. You are one of our own, aren’t you?”
Sandy hesitated. “I guess,” he said. He looked at Morse, who was turning the big silver ring on his finger and staring at the black widow caught inside. “If I could really believe that you had nothing to do with Lynch, or the fire.”
“What you believe is your own goddamned lookout,” Morse snapped impatiently. “To tell the truth, I’m getting fucking tired of you and your questions and your relentless middle-class rationality. You’re not worth this much trouble, Blair. Maybe you ought to just go home and write some nice little novels about defeat and despair.”
“No,” Sandy said quickly. Too quickly, perhaps; his urgency was showing. It was important for him to stay with the Nazgûl, he knew; it was vital that he see it through. But why? Did he believe or not? Was he still a reporter/detective, infiltrating the enemy, hoping to find some proof of Morse’s involvement in the Lynch murder? Or was he one of them, a part of this fever-dream vision of the old days come again? When the time came, would he stop them or help them to succeed? He didn’t even know himself. But he knew he couldn’t go home again. He had no home…unless it was the past. “I’m staying,” he told Edan Morse. “I’ll do your goddamned PR.”
“Good,” Morse said. “Then do it, Blair, and let’s have no more of this pointless squabbling.” Something in his face softened a little then. For an instant he looked almost tired, as though the weight of all this was getting to be too much for him, and his voice sounded vaguely troubled and very human as he said, “Look, we want the same things, really. I’m not so different from you, Sandy. You think I don’t ha
ve doubts? Sometimes I just want to chuck the whole fucking thing and go enjoy my money like a good little capitalist pig. You have to keep the goal in sight, no matter how hard it is.”
“The revolution?” Sandy said.
“Is only a means to an end, and the end is a better world. For everybody. It’s the only way, Sandy. Yesterday fused with today. We’ll wake a lost vision. They will, rather. The Nazgûl. A dead spirit will be reborn to sweep across the land.” Morse stood up suddenly. “You’ll see,” he said. “Everything is going to fall into place, and you’ll see.” He offered Sandy his hand in the Movement handclasp.
Sandy took it. He couldn’t think of a reason to refuse. Morse clasped him hard. “Peace,” he said, with an ironic twist to his mouth.
A slow wet trickle ran between Sandy’s thumb and index finger. He drew his hand away suddenly. His palm was smeared with blood. “You’re cut,” he said to Morse.
“No,” Morse said, but even as he spoke he was staring at his hand. A wash of bright red blood was seeping across his palm and running down his finger. Morse looked at it with something like horror on his face. “No, I can’t…” he said.
“One of your old knife cuts must have come open,” Sandy said.
“Yes, that’s it,” Ananda put in quickly.
Edan Morse stared at her. “The wrong hand. I never cut my right hand, ’Nanda. It was always the left. Always.” He held up his left hand for them to see. It was crisscrossed with a dozen old scars, and a few not so old. But it was dry, while the right hand was bleeding. “What the hell is happening?” Morse said in a shaky voice.
“You must have cut yourself, Edan,” Ananda said. “That’s all. C’mon, we’ll bandage it up and everything’ll be fine, right?” She went to him and put her arms around him, and looked over her shoulder at Sandy. “You better go,” she said. “I’ll give Edan a hand. See you up in the room, love.”
Sandy went to the door slowly. As he stepped into the hall, he was still looking down at his own hand and the smear of Morse’s blood drying rapidly on his skin. Something was wrong, he thought. Something was very, very wrong.
NINETEEN
Purple haze all in my brain/
Basic things don’t seem the same/
I feel funny but I don’t know why
The incident of Morse’s bleeding hand troubled Sandy deeply that night, but in the weeks that followed it was never mentioned, and after a few days he simply put it out of his mind. He was kept so busy by his PR work that it was easy to do. With so little time before the concert in Chicago, his work was cut out for him.
He would have preferred to start slowly; a few rumors floated to the right gossip columns, a whispering campaign in the industry, maybe a planted retrospective or two to remind people who the Nazgûl had been. But there was no time for that kind of strategy, which meant that Sandy had to go for the big splash. There was only one sure way he knew to get the kind of play he wanted. He phoned Hedgehog.
Jared was derisive at first; Sandy was smooth and a touch obsequious. He knew where all of Jared’s buttons were located, and he pushed them. He was suitably mysterious, and dropped plenty of hints about what a blockbuster story this was going to be. He used the word “exclusive” a lot. He promised that he would never phone Jared at home again, not no way, not no how, not ever as long as they both should live, not for no reason whatsoever, solemnly on his mother’s grave. Finally he got what he wanted: the cover.
Then Sandy called Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone and made the same deal with each of them. They were more of a challenge, since he didn’t have quite as good an “in,” but eventually all of them came around. After all, it was a damned big story, and they were getting an exclusive.
“Well,” Sandy told Ananda the night Time finally, grudgingly, agreed to his terms, “I’ve just kissed off any chance of a career in public relations. When all these exclusives come out simultaneously, I’ll lose every fucking bit of credibility I’ve got, and a lot that I haven’t got. Not to mention that I’ll never get a good review from any of them.”
“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it,” Ananda said.
“Why do all my women always quote Superchicken?” Sandy bitched. He brightened. “Oh, well. It’ll be worth it just to watch Jared turn chartreuse. The way I figure the publication schedules, his exclusive will come out fourth.” He smiled. “Froggy the Gremlin would be proud of me,” he added.
Sandy handled each of the reporters the same way. They got interviews with Maggio, Faxon, and Slozewski. They got to photograph the trio to their heart’s content, on stage and off. But they were not allowed to attend a rehearsal, and Larry Richmond was kept very carefully out of sight. Of course, it drove them nuts.
“But what about Hobbins?” They would ask the question of everyone: Sandy, the Nazgûl, the gophers, the groupies. “Do you have a new lead singer?”
“Yes and no,” was the answer everyone was instructed to give.
“What does that mean?”
“We can’t reveal all the details right now. Come to Chicago.”
“You got to give me something!”
“OK. There will be a fourth Nazgûl. A new lead singer, or an old one. Depends on how you look at it. And it will be somebody big. The last person in the world that you’d expect.”
“Can you tell me off-the-record?”
“Sorry.” Regretful shake of the head.
“Will you nod if I guess it?”
Cryptic smile.
“Last person I’d expect, eh? Hmmm. Rod Stewart? No? Mick Jagger? Elton John? Shit. Bruce Springsteen? That’s it, right? No? Fuck. Somebody big, you said? I don’t know. Paul McCartney?”
The reporter from Time, a sarcastic fellow, got bored with the guessing game the fastest. “I know,” he said finally. “It’s Elvis.”
“You’re warm,” Sandy told him with amusement, and then would say no more.
Art directors’ minds work alike, as Sandy knew damn well. Within one four-day period in the middle of May, the exclusives all hit the stands. Newsweek used an old concert photo of the Nazgûl on its cover, with a big red question superimposed over the Hobbins figure. Rolling Stone went with a rehearsal photo of Faxon, Maggio, and Slozewski, with a shadow man drawn in their midst holding a microphone. The shadow had a very Hobbinsesque stance. The Hog used new photographs of the old Nazgûl as well, but they put in a morgue photo of Hobbins to complete the group; then put a big red crosshairs over the Hobbins figure, and a red question mark at the center of the crosshairs, and four of Tolkien’s Nazgûl wheeling around above the band. “Real fucking subtle, Jared,” Sandy commented. Time welshed on him and went with a cover about the troubles in Africa, but they did have the Nazgûl peering out from under the flap in the upper right-hand corner. “Can’t trust anyone these days,” Sandy said.
The mystery of Patrick Henry Hobbins dominated all four stories, as Sandy had known it would. In fact, he had counted on it. It was just the right touch to whet the public interest. The old Nazgûl fans would come out in any event, but by playing it this way he had ensured that the curious would pack into the Civic Auditorium as well.
The writers had played more or less the same notes all the way down the line. Lots of then-and-now photographs. The rise and fall of the group’s first incarnation. The horror of West Mesa. The killer who was never caught. Peter Faxon as one of the great creative forces in rock history. Peter Faxon’s breakdown. The post-Nazgûl careers of Slozewski and Maggio. Maggio and the drugs. Slozewski’s nightclub and the recent tragic fire. Paul Lebeque, who had made the reunion possible by (“allegedly”) killing Jamie Lynch.
Only the tone of the pieces and the writing skill differed greatly. The Hog’s story, Sandy was a bit sad to note, was the worst. Jared’s reporter had recapitulated too damn much puffery; if Sandy had been her editor, she would have been out on her cute little ass. The Rolling Stone story had the most meat to it, and Time was the most cynical. Was it frustrated creativity or simple fin
ancial desperation that had pushed the Nazgûl back together? Time asked. And could they possibly hit it again in an era when musical tastes had changed so markedly, when the charts were dominated by groups like Styx, Journey, and REO Speedwagon, groups whose sound was the antithesis of everything the Nazgûl had symbolized in rock? Time didn’t think so. Sandy didn’t really think so either, but he tried his best to keep his doubts to himself.
Not that it mattered. The atmosphere of doubt and gloom and impending catastrophe that hung over the Nazgûl rehearsals was thick enough to cut with a chain saw, and it grew worse instead of better as the Chicago concert drew closer. Sandy attended a few more sessions, just to see what was happening, and left feeling depressed and tired. There was some improvement, to be sure. Under the whiplash of Faxon’s tongue, Maggio was growing steadier on lead guitar, and had finally learned all the lyrics to all the songs. And Gopher John’s drumming had gotten dramatically better as he shed years of rust and began picking up a few of his old moves again. But no matter how proficient they might be, Richmond was still standing there in front, and Richmond grew no better. He was already trying as hard as he could, but the only one who thought his best sufficient was Balrog. “Maybe we should play dog shows,” Faxon said glumly after one especially trying set.
Sandy saw almost nothing of Edan Morse during those weeks. Morse preferred to deal with the band through Ananda and the omnipresent Gort. That was fine with Sandy; Morse and his bleeding hands gave him the creeps. Ananda was much more congenial company.