Perfect People
1
I am warning you, and I won’t repeat this warning. Don’t take the part. You’d better believe me. You take the part and you are dead. Bitch.
2
Gaia Lafayette was unaware there was a man outside in a station-wagon who had come to kill her. And she was unaware of the email he had sent. She got hate-mail all the time, mostly from religious nutters upset by her use of iconic religious figures in some of her stage acts and her music videos. They were screened, and kept from bothering her, by her trusted Head of Security, Detroit-born Andrew Gulli, a tough ex-cop who’d spent most of his career on close-protection work for vulnerable political figures.
He knew when to be worried enough to tell his boss, and this piece of trash that had come in, from an anonymous Hotmail account, was not something he figured had any substance. His employer got a dozen like this every week.
It was 10 p.m. and Gaia was trying to focus on the script she was reading, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was focused even more on the fact that she had run out of cigarettes. The sweet, but oh-so-dim-witted Pratap – she hadn’t the heart to fire him because his wife had a brain tumour – who did all her shopping, had bought the wrong kind. She had had her limit of four cigarettes a day and didn’t actually need any more, but old habits die hard. She used to mainline the damned things, claiming she needed them for her famed gravelly voice. One before she got out of bed, one burning in the ashtray while she showered. Every action accompanied by a cigarette. Now she was kicking free, but she had to know they were in the house. Just in case she needed them.
And she needed more in life than cigarettes. Starting with her adoring public. The count was up to 3,752,321 Twitter followers – as of the last time she had checked, twenty minutes ago. Up 320 today! She had more than both the performers she viewed as her rivals, Madonna and Lady Gaga! 4,624,000 Facebook friends – up 417 today! 7,847,306 subscribers to her monthly e-newsletter. And then, of course, her seven homes, of which this imitation Tuscan palazzo, built five years ago to her exact specification on this three-acre lot, was the largest.
The walls were hung with Aztec art interspersed with larger-than-life framed posters of herself. The house, like all her others, was a catalogue of her different incarnations. Gaia had reinvented herself constantly throughout her twin careers both as a rock star and movie star, and continued to do so.
Above her head was a huge, framed photo of herself in a black negligee, titled WORLD TOUR GAIA SAVING THE PLANET. Another, with her wearing a green tank-top and leather trousers, was captioned, GAIA REVELATIONS TOUR. Above the fireplace, in greenish-grey monochrome was a close-up of her lips, nose and eyes – GAIA UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL.
Her agent and her manager phoned her daily, both men reassuring her just how much the world needed her. Just the way that her growing social-networking base – all outsourced by her management company – reassured her, too. And, at this moment, the one person in the world she cared about most – Sumo, her adopted son, needed her too. He padded barefoot across the marble floor, in his Armani Junior pyjamas, his brown hair all mussed up, his face scrunched in a frown, and tapped her on the arm as she lay propped against purple velvet cushions on the white sofa.
‘Mama, you didn’t come and read me a story.’
She stretched out a hand and mussed up his hair some more. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie. It’s late, way past your bedtime, and Mama’s really busy tonight, learning her lines. She has a really big part – see? Mama’s playing Maria Fitzherbert, the mistress of an English king! King George the Fourth.’
Maria Fitzherbert was the diva of her day, in Regency England. Just like Gaia was the diva of her day, and they had something profound in common. Maria Fitzherbert spent most of her life in Brighton, in England. And she, Gaia, had been born in Brighton! She felt a connection to this woman, across time. She was born to play this role! But it had been one helluva fight to get it.
Her agent said this was the new The King’s Speech. An Oscar role, no question. And she wanted an Oscar oh so badly. To date, reviews of her movies had ranged from lukewarm to depressingly savage. This role could change everything. She’d fought tooth and claw for this role. She’d fought dirty. And she’d succeeded.
Hell, you had to fight in life. Fortune favoured the brave. Some people were born with silver spoons so far up their rectums they stuck in their gullets, and some, like herself, were born on the wrong side of the tracks. It had been a long journey to here, through her early days of waiting tables, and three husbands, to the place she was at now and where she felt comfortable. Just herself, Sumo, Joe – the fitness instructor who gave her great sex when she needed it and kept out of her face when she didn’t – and her trusted entourage. Team Gaia.
She held up the script. ‘Mama has to learn all this before she flies to England.’
‘You promised.’
‘Didn’t Steffie read to you tonight?’ Steffie was the nanny.
He looked forlorn. ‘You read better. I like it when you read.’
She looked at her watch. ‘It’s ten o’clock. Way past your bedtime!’
‘I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep unless you read to me, Mama.’
She tossed the script onto the glass coffee table and stood up. ‘OK, one quick story. Yes?’
His face brightened. He nodded vigorously.
‘Marla!’ she shouted. ‘Marla!
Her assistant came into the room, cellphone pressed to her ear, arguing furiously with someone about what sounded like the seating arrangements on an airplane.
Marla was shouting. Didn’t the fuckwit airline know who Gaia was? That she could fucking make or break them? She was wearing glittery Versace jeans tucked into black alligator boots, a thin black roll-neck and a gold neck chain that carried the tiny flat gold globe engraved Planet Gaia. It was exactly the same way her boss was dressed tonight. Her hair mirrored her boss, also: blonde, shoulder length, layered in a sharp razor cut with a carefully spaced and waxed fringe.
Gaia Lafayette insisted that all her staff dressed the same way – following the instructions, emailed daily, of what she herself would be wearing and how her hair would be. They had, at all times, to be an inferior copy of herself.
Marla ended the call and snapped the cellphone shut. ‘Sorted!’ she said. ‘They’ve agreed to bump some people off the flight.’ She gave Gaia an angelic smile. ‘Because it’s you!’
‘I need cigarettes,’ Gaia said. ‘Wanna be an angel and go get me some?’
Marla shot a surreptitious glance at her watch. She had a date tonight and was already two hours late for him, thanks to Gaia’s demands – though this was nothing unusual. No previous personal assistant had lasted more than eighteen months before being fired, and she was entering her third year. It was hard work and long hours, but the pay was to die for, as was the experience and, although her boss was tough, she was kind. One day Marla would be free of the chains, but not yet. Not until she’d paid off the mortgage on her Santa Monica apartment. ‘Sure, no problem,’ she replied.
‘Take the Merc.’ It was a balmy hot night. Gaia was smart enough to understand the small perks that went a long way.
‘Cool! I’ll be right back. Anything else?’
Gaia shook her head. ‘You can keep the car for the night.’
‘I can?’
‘Sure, I’m not going anywhere.’
Carla coveted the silver SL 55 AMG. She looked forward to the twisting drive along Sunset to the convenience store. Then to picking up Jay in it afterwards. Who knew how the night might turn out? Every day working for Gaia was an adventure. Just as every night recently, since she had met Jay, was too. He was a budding actor, and she was determined to find a way, through her connection with Gaia, to help him break through.
She did not know it but, as she walked out to the Mercedes, she was making a mistake she would pay for with her life.
3
The valium had started kicking in as he set off from Santa Monica, thirty minutes ago
, calming him. The coke he had snorted in a brief pit stop in the grounds of UCLA in Brentwood, fifteen minutes ago, was giving him energy, and the swig of tequila he took now, from the bottle on the passenger seat beside him, gave him an extra boost of courage.
The ’97 Chevy was a rust bucket, and he drove slowly because the mufflers, which he couldn’t afford to fix, were shot, and he didn’t want to draw attention to himself with their rumbling blatter. In the darkness, with its freshly sprayed coat of paint – which he had applied last night in the lot of the deserted auto wash where he worked – no one would see quite how much of a wreck the automobile was, he figured.
The bald tyres were down to bare canvas in parts, and he could barely afford the gas to get across town. Not that the rich folk around here, in Bel Air, would have any concept of what it meant or felt like to be poor. Behind the high walls and electronic gates were fuck-off houses, sitting way back, surrounded by manicured lawns and all the garden toys of the rich and successful. The haves of LA. Some contrast with the have-nots – the decrepit rented bungalow in the skanky part of Santa Monica he shared with Dana. But that was about to change. Soon she was going to get the recognition she had long deserved. Then they might be rich enough to buy a place like the ones around here.
The occupants of half the homes he passed by were named on the copy of Where The Stars Live, so it was easy to figure out who was who. It lay, crumpled and well-thumbed, beside him, beneath the half-empty tequila bottle. And there was one sure way to cruise the streets of Bel Air without drawing the attention of the infestation of police and private security patrols. Hey, he was an actor, and actors were chameleons, blending into their roles. Which was why he was dressed in a security-guard uniform and was driving right along the outside perimeter wall of Gaia Lafayette’s mansion, passing the dark, fortress-like gates in a gleaming Chevy station-wagon emblazoned with large blue and red letters: BEL AIR PRIVATE SECURITY SERVICES – ARMED RESPONSE. He had applied the wording, from transfers, himself.
The arrogant bitch had totally ignored his email. It had been announced in all the Hollywood trade papers last week that she had boarded the project. She was going to be playing Maria Fitzherbert – or Mrs Fitzherbert as she had been known to the world – mistress of the Prince of Wales of England and secretly married to him. The marriage was never formally approved because she was a Catholic, and, had the marriage been ratified, then her husband could never have become King George the Fourth.
It was one of the greatest love stories in the British monarchy. And in the opinion of the showbiz gossip websites, one of the greatest screen roles ever to have been offered.
Every actress in the world, of the right age, was after it. It had Oscar potential written all over it. And Gaia was a shit actress. She was so not suitable, she would make a total screw-up, the way she had screwed up every role she had ever taken. She was just a rock star, for God’s sake! She wasn’t an actress. She hadn’t trained, been to drama school. She hadn’t struggled for years to get an agent, to get noticed by the players in this city who mattered. All she had done was sing second-rate songs, peel off her clothes, flaunt her body and screw the right people.
And in doing so she had screwed a lot of genuinely talented actresses out of some of the best roles of the past decade.
Like Dana Lonsdale.
And Gaia just did not have the right to do that. She didn’t need the money. She didn’t need to be any more famous than she was already. All she was doing now was feeding her greed and vanity. Taking bread out of everyone else’s mouths to do that.
Someone had to stop her.
He patted the pistol that was jammed in his pocket, nervously. He’d never fired a gun in his life. The damned things made him nervous. But sometimes, you had to do what you believed was right.
It was his pa’s old service gun from the LAPD, which he’d kept after he’d retired early due to his alcohol problems. He’d found it beneath the bed in the old man’s trailer after he had died. It was a Glock. He didn’t even know the calibre but had managed to identify it, from comparisons on the internet, as a .38. The magazine was loaded with eight bullets, and on the floor beside the gun there was a small carton containing more.
At first he had planned to try to sell the thing, or even just throw it away. It made him feel uncomfortable. And right now he partly wished he had binned it. But he couldn’t. It was there, in his home, like an ever-present reminder from his father. That the only way to stop injustices, was to do something about them.
And tonight the time had come. He was intending to stop a big injustice.
Oh yes.
4
Like many farmers, Keith Winter’s favourite time of the day was early morning. He liked to be up before the rest of the world, and he particularly loved this time of year, late May, when it was almost full light at 6 a.m.
Although, on this particular day, he walked out of his house with a heavy heart and crossed the short distance to the chicken shed with leaden steps.
He considered Lohmann Browns to be the best layers, which was the reason he had thirty-two thousand of this particular breed of hens. If you looked after them and nurtured them carefully, free range, during their short lives, the way he did at Stoner Farm, you could get their eggs to taste consistently better than any of those of his rivals.
He kept the birds in humane, healthy surroundings, gave them all the space they needed and fed them on his secret diet of wheat, oil, soya, calcium, sodium and a programme of vitamins. Despite the fact that they were aggressive by nature, and cannibals if given the chance, he was fond of his hens in the way that all good farmers care for the animals that give them their livelihood.
He housed them in a dry, clean, modern single-storey building that stretched out for over one hundred metres across the remote East Sussex hilltop property. Alongside was a row of shiny steel silos containing the grain feed. At the far end were two lorries, which had arrived a short while ago, early though it was. A tractor was parked nearby and sundry agricultural equipment, a rusting shipping container, pallets and sections of railing lay haphazardly around. His Jack Russell bounded around in search of the scent of an early rabbit.
Despite the strong breeze coming in from the English Channel, five miles to the south, Keith could feel the approach of summer in the air. He could smell it in the dry grass and dusty soil and the pollen that gave him hay fever. But, although he loved the summer months, the end of May was always a time of mixed emotions for him. In a few days all his cherished hens would be gone, to end up in markets – their final destination restaurants, delicatessen and supermarket shelves, some as whole, shrink-wrapped birds, and some diced and sliced, or as pre-packed and pre-spiced gourmet chicken dishes.
Most farmer acquaintances he talked to considered their hens to be nothing more than egg-laying machines, and, in truth, his wife Linda thought he was a little nuts the way he became so fond of these dumb creatures. But he couldn’t help it, he was a perfectionist – obsessive about the quality of his eggs and of his birds, constantly experimenting with their diet and supplements and forever working on their accommodation to make it as conducive to laying as possible. Eggs were trundling on the conveyor belt into the grading machine as he entered. He picked one large sample up, checked it for blemishes and colour consistency, tapped the shell for thickness and set it down again, satisfied. It trundled on past a stack of empty egg-cartons and out of sight.
A tall, solidly built 63-year-old, with the youthful face of a man who has retained all his enthusiasm for life, Keith Winter was dressed in an old white T-shirt, blue shorts, and stout shoes with grey socks. The interior of the shed was airy and was partitioned into two sections. He entered the right-hand section now, into an echoing cacophony, like the incoherent babble of a thousand simultaneous cocktail parties. He had long got used to, and barely even noticed, the almost overpowering reek of ammonia from the creatures’ droppings, which fell through slats in the gridded metal floor into the sump below.
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As one particularly aggressive hen pecked, painfully, at the hairs on his leg, he stared along the length of the shed at the sea of brown and white birds with their red chests and crests, strutting around busily, as if they had important engagements awaiting them. The shed was already starting to thin out, and large areas of the gridding were visible. The catchers had started early this morning – nine workers from Eastern Europe, mostly Latvian and Lithuanian, in their protective clothing and face masks, and were grabbing hens, carrying them out through the doors at the far end and placing them in specially designed cages in the lorries.
The process would take four days and at the end the shed would be empty, leaving just the bare grid. A team from a specialist company would then come in to lift up the grid slats and remove the year’s collection of droppings with a mechanical bobcat.
Suddenly, he heard a shout from the far end of the shed and saw one of the workers running towards him, dodging through the hens, his face mask removed.
‘Mr Boss!’ the man shouted urgently at Keith in broken English, with a look of panic on his face. ‘Mr Boss, sir! Something not right. Not good. Please you come have look!’
5
The electric gates were opening.
Shit!
He was so not expecting this. Who was coming out? Probably a change of security guards, he thought, but this was too good an opportunity to miss – just in case it was the bitch herself! She was known to like going out on her own. Although most of the time when she went jogging, according to the press, she had more security guards around her than the President of the USA.
He braked hard, switched off the Chevy’s engine and pulled the heavy gun out of his trouser pocket. He stared at the gates. At the blazing headlights of a car waiting for the gap to be big enough to drive through.