High Life (24 page)
Makeup was in a block-mounted trailer outside a soundstage. The seats weren’t padded and I couldn’t smoke, but it felt great to have skinny girls fussing over me, to be the center of attention in a town where the ability to attract attention is the single most important attribute a human being can possess. They cut my hair, angling it in above the ears because it looked better on TV that way, and put a load of stuff on my face. The director came in for a thirty-second hello and a script girl gave me a couple of pages to get familiar with. While I was reading them a messenger arrived with a card from Howard Welks welcoming me on board. It came attached to a brown plastic tube of 10mg Valium. I wasn’t sure if it was a hint that I wouldn’t be able to hack it, or whether it was just a cool present at a time when doctors were reluctant to prescribe downers. Whatever, I was reasonably coked and adding a little benzo to my bloodstream didn’t seem like a bad idea.
I looked good in the mirror. They’d given me drops to clear my eyes and mousse to thicken my hair. Foundation and powder made my skin look smooth. For no reason at all I felt like jerking off over Ryan’s photos.
Inside the subdivided soundstage the assistant director had me run through a series of link-shots. He told me it was all I was going to do for a while until I got easy in front of the camera. I didn’t care. If it went on too long I’d get Bella to call Welks.
A moron could have done the work. All I had to do was stand in front of a blue screen and read a couple of lines at a time off the autocue, the same stuff I’d already half memorized in makeup earlier. There were a lot of people in the studio, but the cocaine and the radiance of the set lights insulated me from them, formed a dazzling cocoon that sealed away my self-consciousness and prevented it from sabotaging this, my first step toward celebrity. I was on. I was up. I threw out vitality with halogen intensity. Shit, anyone can make an effort if it means getting on TV.
I finished everything they needed me for around three. The director had a break then, too, and took me to a bar off the lot. His name was James and he said he loved what I did, but it was pretty obvious he was drinking with me to see how much I knew about film. I couldn’t match him on who directed what, or when a particular process became available to the industry. But I beat him hands down on who was fucking who and how much they paid for their houses.
After a bit he left to get back to the studio—Lorn was coming in to do some cutaways. I stayed to get another Southern and one of the makeup girls came in with a friend. We drank together, then I let her suck me off in the bathroom. Not because I was attracted to her, or even because I felt like having sex, but just because it was one of the things you could get if you were on TV and it seemed stupid to turn it down.
Outside. Afterwards. The air was heavy and the hills around Burbank were hazed. All the dead people up on the slopes of Forest Lawn made me think of Karen. I had ten grand a month and a place in the hills now. It would have been enough to have kept her with me, to have made her whoring unnecessary. Money solves all problems. It makes people love you. It makes them stay with you when they would otherwise leave. With ten K a month I could have given Karen a life so good it would simply have cost her too much to leave me.
The adrenaline from my first day shooting started to turn bad, mixing with the burned-out coke, Valium, and booze, making me feel stale and vulnerable. I wanted things to be simple, to have Bella and what she could do for me, without the danger of Ryan and Powell and blackmail and murder.
I went back to the parking lot at Warner and sat in the Mustang watching the traffic pass outside the gates, wishing I could be free of the past, but keep the present.
Bella called me on my mobile as I was about to start the car. We chatted about the day’s taping, then she told me Powell had located a candidate for their healthcare scheme and that I shouldn’t bother coming to Malibu that night as she wouldn’t be there. I didn’t care. I was too tired to make the slog out to the house anyhow—all I really wanted right then was to shut myself away and go to sleep.
The house on Willow Glen was open-plan with a lot of glass. I’d chosen it because of the amount of air and light that went with the rooms. Everything in it was new. I’d left the walls bare—no pictures, no ornaments—but I’d picked the furniture and the technology carefully; they were all the decoration I needed.
Early evening. I drank a bottle of Gatorade and went to sleep on top of a Japanese quilt that cost two thousand dollars. I didn’t wake until the phone rang around eleven.
I couldn’t assimilate at first. I knew the voice, but the fact that it was calling me caused momentary brainlock. Powell. Sounding as smug as he had when he asked if I wanted to see his photos of Bella. He told me to meet him in front of the Beverly Hills Civic Center in half an hour. He hung up before I could ask questions.
I showered, dressed, put the top up on the Mustang, and powered down Laurel Canyon through the still-warm night. Sunset to La Cienega, La Cienega to Santa Monica Boulevard where the streetlights ran in soft orange disks over the polished hood of my car and the wind of my passage drew cigarette smoke through my open window, out into the city.
I was ten minutes late. I wanted to pretend I didn’t give a shit, that whatever he wanted to see me about couldn’t possibly be worse than the tape of him with his dick inside Bella. But this time of night, with Bella apparently out of the loop, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might be on line for info relating to Karen’s death.
I pulled up beside his Jag and he ran the window down. Dead eyes turned on me like something out of
The Terminator.
His smile looked cut into his face. He said to follow him. Then he ran the window back up again.
I tailed him through the flats and on up into the hills. At the edge of Beverly Hills we took San Ysidro Drive along Peavine Canyon for about three miles to a narrow track called Apricot Lane.
Apricot Lane was marked as a private road but it didn’t have a gate. It cut right off San Ysidro and a couple of hundred yards later cut right again. I noticed one or two houses, but they were set way back off the road and almost hidden by shrubbery. Powell drove past them to the end of the lane and a large squat building that hadn’t been built to be looked at. Vines had been planted to break the monotony of its slabbed sand-colored walls, but they couldn’t disguise the fact that the place was essentially a bunker. The few windows I could see were barred and a tall fence of steel rails ran around the perimeter of the property.
We drove immediately into a four-car garage. The door rolled down behind us automatically and I knew right away no one lived in the house. There was none of the crap that usually accumulates in garages, no tools, no beach equipment, no boxes of junk. The only other thing there besides Powell’s Jaguar and my Mustang was Bella’s 850ci.
Instead of a door leading into the ground floor of the house there was a concrete ramp that sloped to the basement. Powell led me down it, told me not to make any noise, and unlocked a steel-plated door. We went through it, into something that resembled a microhospital—green walls, vinyl floors, overhead strip lighting. Powell locked the door behind us, held a finger to his lips, and motioned me to follow him along a corridor. We passed a couple of what appeared to be examination rooms with reinforced doors and security locks, then a set of double swing-doors that gave onto some sort of pre-op area. Through the small windows in these doors I caught a glimpse of something that looked like a covered body on a trolley. A little further along the corridor there was an ordinary wooden door, unlocked. Powell killed the ceiling lights and eased it open. A small room, space for two people to stand, a window like cop show interrogation rooms. He put his lips to my ear and whispered:
“The glass is one-way. Do not make a sound or she will know you are here. Do not leave this room. I will come for you after we finish. Watch your lover carefully.”
He left and I looked through the glass. On the other side a hard white light fell on a small operating theater. It looked like a scaled-down version of something out of
ER
—a lot of stainless steel, a lot of equipment that flashed lights and fed into monitors, trolleys that held rows of shiny instruments on squares of green material and a big light cluster on a movable arm. There was no one in it right then, but ten minutes later Powell and Bella, wearing caps, gowns, and masks, wheeled an unconscious naked man through a pair of connecting doors and positioned him under the lights. He lay on his side and had a drip in his arm. The space between his ribs and hip bone had been coated with some kind of yellow-brown dye.
Powell sat at the man’s head, put a gas feed over his face, and started turning knobs on a trio of cylinders while Bella hooked the guy up to a couple of machines. They talked to each other as they worked, but with their masks and the wall between us I couldn’t make out what they said.
When she was ready, Bella nodded at Powell, picked up a scalpel, and started cutting. I couldn’t see too well because her back was toward me, but it looked like she made a long horizontal incision under the ribs. Her concentration was intense, she moved quickly and economically, discarding one instrument after another, plucking fresh ones from the trolley at her side. I saw smears of blood on her rubber gloves.
The precision of the process fascinated me, but for some reason I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that operational efficiency wasn’t the only thing happening in that room. The way Bella held herself, the way she pressed her pelvis against the side of the gurney, the grace of her hands and arms … all of it suggested a sensuality that was out of place against the hardware of surgery.
It went on a long time and I got tired of standing still. I had to shift position occasionally to stop my legs aching and once, when I did this, I bumped the glass of the window. In the operating room Bella froze and flicked a hard look at Powell, but he was busy concentrating on the aneasthetic. After a couple of seconds she relaxed and continued what she was doing.
Sometime later the operation hit its peak. Bella reached inside the man, made a few final strokes with her scalpel and appeared to cut something free of whatever held it in place. Then, using both hands, she lifted a curved thing about five inches long out into the air.
A kidney.
Big surprise.
Deposits of hard yellow fat clung about the base of a severed stem which protruded from the middle of the inside curve and had obviously been the thing’s main connection to the body. Thin blood dripped from strands of tissue that wrapped the smooth organ like a ripped caul. It was a lot pinker and softer than the ones you see at the meat counter, maybe because it was so fresh.
Bella put it in a plastic container, clipped a transparent lid over it, and handed it to Powell. He looked uncertain for a moment and said something to her. Bella shook her head, turned back to her patient, and started putting in some internal stitches. Powell spoke to her again but she didn’t answer, and after a moment’s hesitation he carried the kidney across the room and put it in a fridge.
I stayed a little longer, but it was obvious they were on the home stretch and I couldn’t see the point of standing around just to watch the mop-up—I’d been in the room close to two hours already. As I eased open the door Bella was sewing up the guy’s stomach.
I couldn’t get back out into the garage because the steel door needed a key to be unlocked even from the inside, so I decided to go exploring. At the far end of the corridor a flight of steps led up to the ground floor of the house. There was another steel door at the top, but this one was unlocked. I wandered through the rooms on the other side of it. A lounge and two of the bedrooms were furnished—carpets, drapes, soft chairs, all the comforts of home—a facade of normality in which to recover from those tiring kidney excisions. Everywhere else was bare and looked permanently uninhabited. The cupboards in the kitchen held cans and packets but nothing fresh. I locked myself in a bathroom and lit a cigarette.
So, now I knew for certain that Bella took kidneys out of people. And it was plain that, out of the two of them, it was she, not Powell, who was the driving force behind the operations.
She’d told me the free medical care thing was her idea, and as a result I’d taken her involvement in the kidney removals pretty much for granted. But I’d been hoping she played only a minor role in this darker side of their philanthropy—as an assistant to Powell say. Or, even better, as an unwilling participant in an old man’s obsession. Now I knew differently. And it worried me. Karen’s death was connected to the sale of her kidney, I was sure of it, and, without anything to say otherwise, it didn’t seem absurd to suppose that whoever played the dominant role in the operations might well have played a similar role in her murder. A logical train of thought, but not one I wanted to pursue. Not while Bella’s freedom meant I appeared on TV.
I concentrated instead on wondering what Powell had been so eager to reveal to me. It couldn’t be just that Bella was performing an illegal operation. After all, his role as procurer and anesthetist made him as guilty as her in that respect. Maybe he thought seeing her open someone up would turn me off her. But she was, after all, a doctor, even if she wasn’t a surgeon, and wasn’t that what doctors did?
The only thing I could think was that more was supposed to happen but didn’t because, after I’d knocked the glass, she’d known she was being watched. But what the fuck else could she have been planning to do?