Rake Read online

  RAKE

  A NOVEL

  SCOTT PHILLIPS

  COUNTERPOINT

  BERKELEY

  Rake

  Copyright © 2013 by Scott Phillips

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available

  ISBN 978-1-61902-221-8

  Cover design by Michael Fusco, M+E/Michael Fusco Design

  Interior design by Gerilyn Attebery

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  “That’s a lot of superstitious baloney.”

  “Superstitious, maybe. Baloney, maybe not.”

  —David Manners and Bela Lugosi, in The Black Cat, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe, written by Edgar G. Ulmer and Peter Ruric, and directed by Ulmer

  RAKE

  Contents

  VENDREDI, TREIZE MAI

  FIFTEEN DAYS EARLIER: JEUDI, VINGT-HUIT AVRIL

  VENDREDI, VINGT-NEUF AVRIL

  SAMEDI, TRENTE AVRIL

  DIMANCHE, PREMIER MAI

  LUNDI, DEUX MAI

  MARDI, TROIS MAI

  MERCREDI, QUATRE MAI

  JEUDI, CINQ MAI

  VENDREDI, SIX MAI

  SAMEDI, SEPT MAI

  DIMANCHE, HUIT MAI

  LUNDI, NEUF MAI

  MARDI, DIX MAI

  MERCREDI, ONZE MAI

  JEUDI, DOUZE MAI

  VENDREDI, TREIZE MAI

  SAMEDI, QUATORZE MAI

  DIMANCHE, QUINZE MAI

  LUNDI, SEIZE MAI

  MARDI, DIX-SEPT MAI

  MERCREDI, DIX-HUIT MAI

  JEUDI, DIX-NEUF MAI

  VENDREDI, VINGT MAI

  SAMEDI, VINGT-ET-UN MAI

  VENDREDI, TREIZE—: QUELQUES MOIS PLUS TARD

  VENDREDI, TREIZE MAI

  IT’S MAYBE 2:00 OR 3:00 AM WHEN I AWAKEN to the smell of Esmée still clinging to the sheets and to the unmistakable sensation of someone’s presence in the apartment. Esmée left hours ago, and though the lights are out and I hear nothing but the sound of the air conditioner cycling, my instincts tell me I’m right. Sliding off of the bed as quietly as I can, I crouch and try to remember where I put my telescoping baton. All right, got it, my inside sportjacket pocket, but where’s the jacket?

  Too late for that anyway. Someone’s standing in the doorway of the bedroom, and I don’t know if he sees me or not.

  I’m next to an end table, and as quietly as possible I run my hand over it, trying to remember whether there’s anything on it that might be used as a weapon. My hand clasps something oblong, made of stone and weighing a good two and a half kilos.

  I’m creeping toward the figure when a flash goes off, the sound of gunfire mostly muffled by a silencer. A moment later my would-be killer flicks on the light switch and reveals himself: Claude Guiteau has come to do his own dirty work, using his own two hands. I’m almost proud of the old boy as I swing my blunt object down over his head. This all takes place in the split second he stands there puzzling over the fact that there’s no corpse in the bed, just a bullet hole in the pillow.

  Once down, he’s not completely out. The pistol’s on the floor, though, and for a few slow moments he gazes in blurry puzzlement up at me. Then to my relief, he passes out; I don’t want to hit him again, having realized that I’ve bludgeoned him with a very fine piece of antique jade, another blow to which might snap it.

  I set about restraining him and consider my options. What, for example, will happen if I call the cops? Scandal would lead to some really first-rate publicity, which would in no way harm my bankability; but with Claude in prison our project would stall, maybe fatally.

  Kill him? Not here, in his own apartment, certainly. It occurs to me that, given his line of work, he might have the kind of enemies who’d pay to see him dead, might even pay to have him handed over alive in order to kill him themselves in some exquisitely horrible and painful manner.

  But having the man tortured to death seems unsporting. After all, this attempt on my life would have been instantaneous and quite possibly painless, had he succeeded. I dial Fred, whose business this is whether he knows it or not, and tell him to come over immediately and to be discreet about it. Take a cab and get out a couple of blocks away, I tell him.

  “You want to have a story meeting now? At three-fifteen in the morning?”

  “Not a story meeting. This is more of a finance meeting. Now get your ass on over here.”

  •••

  By the time he arrives I have poor Claude trussed up like a prize steer at a rodeo. In one unlocked drawer in the closet was a plentiful supply of ropes, gags, nipple clips, and so on, something I’ll have to question Esmée about at some future date. For the moment, however, they’re perfect for restraining Claude, who has yet to regain consciousness. When Fred walks into the kitchen he finds Claude unconscious and tightly bound to the chair with a bright sky-blue ball gag stuffed in his mouth.

  “Holy shit,” Fred says.

  “Yeah. You got any ideas for getting rid of the son of a bitch?”

  “Who is he?”

  I’d forgotten Fred hadn’t met him yet. “Esmée’s husband.”

  His voice rises about an octave. “Our backer?”

  “He tried to kill me.”

  “What for?”

  “I guess he found out I was banging his old lady.”

  “Goddamn it.” He raises his hands to his temples and spins around once in disbelief at my carelessness. “Didn’t I warn you not to do that? Shit. You think he’s going to put up the money now?”

  I had given that a fair amount of thought while preparing for Fred’s arrival. He wasn’t going to put up any money now, that was for sure. “That’s what you’re here for. You’re the brains of the outfit.”

  He stares at Claude for a minute, the cogs rolling in his head, and I feel a sudden burst of confidence in him. Whatever I’ve done, Fred’s the guy who’s going to make it better.

  “Happy Friday the thirteenth,” I tell him. “I do have one small suggestion. I know a girl who has access to a meat locker.”

  He thinks it over, seems to approve. He’s a smart fellow, cautious and analytical, and if he approves of the idea, I feel certain it’s a sound one.

  Maybe, I think, I’m home free. Maybe the curse of the calendar did its damage to Claude rather than to me. I am, after all, a member of a superstitious profession, an avoider of black cats and hats left on the bed and broken mirrors. Perhaps the gods of superstitions have rewarded me for all my years of fidelity.

  •••

  Or maybe I’m fucked.

  FIFTEEN DAYS EARLIER:

  JEUDI, VINGT-HUIT AVRIL

  YOU KNOW ME, OR MORE PRECISELY YOU have the distinct impression that you know me; it probably amounts to the same thing, from your point of view at least. For five years I played Dr. Crandall Taylor, dissolute, randy, ne’er-do-well bastard son of Senator Harwood Taylor on an American soap opera called Ventura County. No one paid the show any attention at all back home, where it ran five days a week at eleven in the morning, watched only by the loneliest and horniest of housewives and the laziest of college students. In Europe, tho
ugh, they had the bright idea of running us in the evening, right at the start of prime time, and to everyone’s surprise we turned into a massive hit. With each one-hour episode cut in half, our five-year run will last ten over here, and though the show’s been out of production for three years, we’re still a success in most of Europe, with several years’ worth of episodes still to run.

  And I was the star of the thing. I can’t cross the street in Paris without somebody doing a double-take and calling out “Hey, Crandall,” or have dinner in a nice restaurant without having to interrupt my conversation and chat with some well-meaning, star-struck viewer.

  This is the point in the story where you’ll be expecting the usual celebrity whine about loss of privacy, intrusive fans, and how much I wish I had my anonymity back. You’re thinking how happy you’d be, how if you were wallowing in money and pussy and adulation from complete strangers, if you could just walk right into some club with a line stretching down the sidewalk, if the chef always wanted to send you something a little extra just for doing him the favor of showing up at his restaurant, if people were scrambling to get you to make a CD or a new TV show and pay you even more money and make you even more famous, well, that’d be just fine with you.

  So I’m going to surprise you right here and leave out the bitching. Sure, sometimes it’s a drag when someone interrupts a meal, but so fucking what? I’m an actor. What exactly did I think I was signing up for here? It’s great, getting treated like something special. Free stuff, brazen women—especially women who are normally demure but who get sexually aggressive when they see a celebrity—preferred seating everywhere I go: yeah, this is pretty much the life you imagine it is. And it’s great.

  •••

  For example: Not long ago I was spending a pleasant evening in a nightclub off the Étoile. The bouncer let me in without paying, management sent over a complimentary bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and as I scanned the crowd for some woman who might want to come back to my suite, an attractive lady came over to my table, leaned down to whisper in my ear, and then casually suggested I might want to fuck her while her husband watched. She was in her early thirties, wearing a blue minidress and high-heeled shoes that in the dim light of the club seemed to match it. Her face promised something wild, with a sharp little nose and a crooked smile and big, round doe eyes that didn’t ever seem to blink. Her hair was cut razor-close at the sides, and as she spoke to me she was making little rotating motions with her pelvis as though she were already gearing up for it, and I thought what the hell?

  So the three of us headed for their apartment in the sixteenth, with hubby driving while I fingerbanged milady in the backseat. I was a little disappointed that she wasn’t wearing underwear, since one of my favorite moments when fucking a girl for the first time is that moment when your fingers cross that elastic Maginot Line of her panties. She was making a hell of a lot of noise while I did it, and our driver drove without betraying any reaction whatsoever. I suppose that was part of the thrill of it for the poor bastard.

  Their apartment was furnished like the palace at Versailles, all really old stuff, and quality, too. The paintings on the wall dated from about the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth and ranged from portraiture to landscapes executed in an academic style. (Did I mention I had a master’s degree in theater arts from Southwest Minnesota State University? And here you were thinking that actors were dolts.) The nanny came out to greet us, a British girl of twenty with zits and thick glasses who I could tell was going to be a knockout in about five years once the adolescence drained out of her. She recognized me immediately and blushed, and without commenting on my presence gave my hosts a report on the evening’s activities. Their children had behaved admirably, and apparently the youngest had taken several steps unassisted.

  Once the girl was dismissed I followed the couple back to their bedroom. The wife instructed the husband in rather stern terms to sit in what looked to me like a genuine Louis XV fauteuil and not say a word. Then she went down on me for a minute or two, and when I was erect she leapt onto the bed, on all fours, and said, “Give me what my husband can’t.”

  As I fucked her in various and sundry positions she verbally abused her husband in the third person, excoriating his manhood, his potency, his decency as a human being, and I found myself wondering how these two had managed to find each other, and whether the whole routine had started out as his thing or hers. In any case, I didn’t mind being watched, and when at length I finished I looked over at him. He’d shot a load onto the ceiling, which seemed to disprove his wife’s claims of impotence.

  “My God, you must think I’m the world’s worst hostess, I haven’t even offered you anything to drink,” she said, slipping her dress back on as her husband mopped up his mess with a tissue. We moved into the salon and she rang for a maid in the sort of uniform I didn’t think housemaids really wore any more.

  “Fetch monsieur a whisky,” my hostess said, and the maid, whose uniform, I noted, was a bit too short to be really practical, scooted out of the room. I supposed that part of her duties involved some other pedestrian sexual fantasy: spanking the maid, or some sort of infantilism. Perhaps she did double duty as a naughty nurse. “I’m Marie-France,” the wife said, “and this is my husband, Gérard.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, without bothering to pretend they didn’t already know me.

  “What brings you to Paris?” the happily cuckolded Gérard said.

  “Trying to get a film set up.”

  “How exciting,” Marie-France said.

  This was true, more or less. I had a couple of contacts who’d expressed interest in trying to raise money for a feature. So far, though, they were full of hot air and not one of them had the wherewithal to get a movie made. One of them even suggested that I commission a screenplay myself, after which he’d help me get it made. No thanks, asshole.

  “I hope we’ll see you again. Perhaps we can visit the set when you’re filming,” she said after the maid had brought me my whisky.

  “That would be fine with me.” I produced a carte de visite and handed it to her. She made a point of having her fingertips linger on mine, as though we’d just met and were flirting. It was kind of charming, but the number on the carte was from a different hotel and a previous visit, and I didn’t imagine I’d be seeing them again.

  VENDREDI, VINGT-NEUF AVRIL

  NEXT MORNING I GOT UP EARLY AND HAD coffee and a croissant on the terrace of a café down the avenue from the hotel. It was a Friday, the sidewalk was crowded, and I enjoyed the expressions of surprise on the passersby as they registered my presence. One sweet-looking woman of eighty or so stopped, excused herself, and asked whether I was or was not, in fact, Dr. Crandall Taylor.

  “I play him on television,” I replied.

  “I thought that was you. I have a bone to pick with you, young man.”

  “What’s that?”

  She drew herself up straight, took a deep breath, and cocked her head at an angle that suggested a stinging lecture was about to be delivered. I suspected she’d been a schoolteacher once.

  “You’ve made a terrible, foolish mistake,” she said. “That young woman was the love of your life, and you let her go over a foolish dalliance with that other doctor. A dalliance that you provoked, may I add, by your own repeated infidelities.”

  I toyed with the idea of trying to explain the difference between myself and the character I played, but the old dear was clearly out of her mind. I merely nodded, trying to remember what happened after Constance had her affair with Dr. Corby. Had Taylor taken her back immediately, or had there been a marriage or three in between? It was a bit of a blur at this remove.

  “You’re absolutely right, madame,” I said. “Constance means everything to me. I will try to act on your advice.”

  She squinted. “You sound funny. Like an American.”

  “Everybody sounds different on television.”

  She nodded her acceptance of the theory, t
hen rolled up the left sleeve of her sweater. “What do you make of that?” she asked, pointing to a purplish splotch that looked remarkably like the other purplish splotches in its vicinity, as well as those on her face, neck, and hands.

  I squinted and frowned, brought my forefinger to my lips to invoke the diagnostic process. I might not have had it in me to be a real doctor, but I would have had a kick-ass bedside manner. Real doctors have told me this, and a young allergist I once consulted told me he’d been such a fan of the show in med school that he’d modeled some of his gestures and tics after my own. That was one of my proudest moments as an actor.

  “How long have you had this?” I asked, my tone midway between concern and reassurance.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A while.”

  “I’d like you to see your regular doctor as soon as possible. He knows your history better than I do. And once he’s examined it, you come back here and let me know what he says.”

  “Here? To the café?”

  “I’m here most mornings.”

  She nodded in a grave manner and proceeded on her way.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d received such advice from a stranger. Constance, the love of the good doctor’s turbulent life, was incarnated on the TV screen by the lovely Tasha Coltrane, and I always thought one reason the viewers had so much emotion invested in that romance was that Tasha and I were fast friends off the set. A great number of those viewers assumed that we were actually lovers offscreen, which might have happened if not for the impediment of Tasha’s lesbianism; I guess part of our rapport must have been based on our ability to sit around for hours and talk about pussy.

  One actress I did fuck off and on over the show’s years in production was Becky Tremaine, who played Dr. Taylor’s half-sister Vanessa. I have discovered that fans of the show don’t take well to this knowledge; they react to the news as though we were actual siblings, and so I made it a point never to travel with her. (I don’t even want to think about what would happen if they found out I’d also fucked Frances Lannigan, who played Dr. Taylor’s mother. In fact, I was pretty careful to keep Becky in the dark about that one.) Becky’s own mother was Lucy Tremaine, a television star of the sixties whose name is better known in the States than here, and her stepfather directed half the sitcoms ever aired.