Naked Angels

JUDI JAMES

Naked Angels

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

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About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

London 1995

THE MODEL

Even when she was dying she was still counting the calories: none in the hot water toddy at breakfast, ten in the Extra Strong mint on the way to the shoot. She licked the insides of her teeth, savouring everything.

The model’s changing room was shared. Two males and herself. The sour but tasty stench of quick-tan and the sick-sweet perfume of hashish. She watched them push tissues down the front of their trunks while her stomach gnawed painfully. Too much padding? One less? Why not go for it? They laughed easily. Their pubic hair had been waxed. They looked gleamily good. She weighed less than seven stone but she still looked crap. Too fat – too much around the hips.

She listened to the male models laughing and thought they were making fun of her. Paranoia. She knew she was right, though. She gave her grave face a few little smacks to raise some colour onto it. It was six a.m. She sighed and lit her fourth cigarette of the day.

The litany continued in her head. Two dry biscuits for dinner. Three Strawberry Pop Tarts yesterday, even if she did throw them up later. Her last binge had been over a week ago: chocolate spread sandwiches on thick white bread with butter, yellow-cream rice puddings, Alpen, pink-iced cakes, and cheese triangles on warmed rolls. It had taken her an hour to be sick afterwards and she’d lain exhausted on the bathroom floor feeling the linoleum tiles cool against her cheek.

The make-up made her skin hurt. She’d studied it like a science and knew exactly what it was doing to her flesh – every liposome, every nanosphere, every trace of phytobium. She winced and the make-up artist halted.

‘The sponge – it’s a bit scratchy. Have you got a softer one?’

He smiled but his teeth formed a set line as he went to fetch a new one. She closed her eyes and relaxed a little.

The set was bare – just the model and the guys. The photographer was firing instructions at her. She had so much oil on her body she slid off the male models like an eel. They touched one another breezily between shots, swapping muscle tone.

She’d do it that evening, definitely. She didn’t want any more of this.

Back in the changing room she stared at herself in the mirror. Six feet tall. A freak, dressed in two-hundred quid fishnets and denim cut-offs with the bum sagging. And the shoes – velvet stiletto tart shoes with diamante toe-caps – she liked the shoes, they were pretty.

She was fifteen years old, yet she felt three hundred and nine. Fifteen seemed a long time to have lived. She wanted to be young again. She wanted an end to it all.

THE ILLUSIONIST

The photographer sat before his computer screen, the model’s image flickering and dancing in front of his face. The room was dark. His face was half lit and eerie. The model was perfectly reflected as a pair of tiny twins, trapped in the round orbs of his Calvin Klein wire-rimmed glasses.

‘It’s a conceptual shot,’ he told his assistant. ‘You mean it’s shit.’

‘It’s OK,’ the photographer said, ‘it doesn’t matter. It’s the concept – the concept is sound.’

‘She looks bad,’ the assistant said, studying the model’s image.

‘Bad as in good?’ the photographer asked.

‘No, bad as in bad. Really bad. I thought she was supposed to be a name. What’s the matter with her, her face looks like Emmenthal. Is she on something? I thought she was special.’

‘The client wanted her,’ the photographer told him, ‘it’s OK, I told you.’ He lit a cigarette and pushed it into the side of his mouth. Smoke billowed from his nostrils and arched around his head.

‘I’m so disappointed,’ the boy said.

‘You won’t be,’ he was told. ‘A little computer enhancement and we will have created your true goddess for you again.’

He pressed a few keys and pulled the model’s face into close-up. He felt as though he was a true artist, creating a perfect image with a few finger-flicks: less darkness under the eyes. Bleached pupils. A small mark removed from the cheek. He added warmth and tone to her pallid cheeks and widened her distressed-looking smile.

‘What d’you think?’ he asked. The boy leant forward. Both faces were lit gleaming and frog-like by the flickering colours on screen.

‘It’s cheating,’ the assistant said. He laughed, though. The model looked the way he knew her now. She looked like the face everyone saw in the magazines. Healthy. Glowing. Fuckable.

The photographer shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s art. Total empowerment via VDU. We’ve become the creative force we always yearned to be. Look at that fucking face – I created that face, just like Leonardo created the Mona Lisa.’

He sat back in his chair, scratching himself, swinging gently. ‘It’s all illusion, son, playing tricks with images. Digital imaging – fucking brilliant. Photographers have been cheating for years, only now we can do it all with a finger-twitch.

‘Did you know one of the first patentees of the photographic process was a prize illusionist?’ he asked. ‘There’s some history here, it’s a tradition – only now we’ve got it down to an art form. Don’t you like what you see?’ He turned to his assistant, the light in his glasses obscuring his eyes. ‘Don’t you like it?’ he repeated.

The boy smiled.

‘Does it matter that what you see doesn’t exist?’ the photographer whispered. ‘Do you think many of the punters have a hope in hell of meeting her in the flesh anyway? It’s trickery, son, hocus-pocus, jiggery-pokery. It’s alchemy – turning basest metals into gold. And she is gold, isn’t she? Look at her – shit, man, look at her. We got rid of all her faults. We made her perfect.’

He looked back to the screen, stroking his stubble. ‘Maybe a little more leg,’ he said. His assistant nodded his approval.

THE PAPARAZZI

Flaccid had to be the saddest word in the English language. The snapper shifted sagging weight from ossified femur to atrophied tibia. Never fuck a fashion hack – why had no one ever told him that? Or maybe they had. Maybe he just forgot.

The incense made his nose itch. When he moved again he could just glimpse the faux-snakeskin linoleum behind the post-modernist Conran headboard. She should take the Hoover round there more often, he thought – there were dustballs the size of large rats down by the marble-effect skirting. Or were they rats? Jesus!

That season the fashion hack was into Tantric Sex. She slid deftly into the Lotus position, opening her mouth and sticking her tongue out like a Maori rugby player prior to a match. He’d bought her dinner at Quaglino’s but she’d barfed it all up in the john half an hour later to balance her inner toxins.

He was so bored it hurt but she was Lavender Allcock-Hopkins, just about The Biggest Name in the Fashion Business, so he gritted his buttocks and pressed on with the Chi Gung. When the portable phone chirruped from beneath the herb-stuffed continental pillow he could have fucked that instead, he was so relieved for the interruption.

‘Where are you, you bugger?’ It was the editor of the Sunday Slimes, sizzling and shouting as though Edison Bell were just a figment of some ad-man’s imagination. The snapper held the phone near the open window so the traffic sounds fizzed down the wires.

‘Kensington Palace,’ he yelled, ‘down at the gates. There’s a bit of serious to-ing and fro-ing down here and word is out the prince …’

‘Sod the prince!’ his editor screamed. ‘Get down to Piccadilly. There’s some sort of awards night going on and Spike says they’ve just smuggled some celebs in by the tradesman’s. Are you on your bike?’

The snapper grunted. In his haste he’d shoved two feet into one leg of his Gaultiers. He scowled across at Lavender but she was into her forty-fifth inner-vaginal orgasm and so barely aware he was AWOL from the Futon.

There were hideous whale sounds playing on the CD. The flask of amyl nitrate he’d brought lay untouched atop the Jeff Koons Retrospective catalogue. That little gift had been received with all the enthusiasm of a box of Quality Streets on a first date.

“Bye, lover,’ the snapper mouthed, quickly syphoning Givenchy beneath each armpit before picking up the keys to his Harley and tossing them twice into the air. Lavender was silent but the whales hooted their eerie farewell.

THE KILL

It was raining – but then the rain always drizzled on a true paparazzo. They stank of the rain – it steamed from their anoraks and snaked through their hair gel, bubbling like mucus. Without the rain they would have lost the kudos that came with the cupped cigarettes and the serious body-hunch.

As the snapper strolled across to join the straggle they quickly banded together, staring like meerkats spoiling for a fight.

‘Who is it in there tonight?’

‘Fuck-knows.’

‘Again? We did him last night.’ ‘Very funny.’ ‘You think so?’ ‘No, actually.’

‘It’s Paul Daniels, I saw him go in.’

‘Buggeroff.’

‘Buggeroffyerself.’

Some even claimed it was the patter and camaraderie that kept them loyal to the job.

The snapper tried to shin a low wall but slipped and scuffed his trainers and grazed his palm into the bargain. He swore and scowled at the nearest of the pack, daring him to laugh. He didn’t.

There was a sudden surge around the entrance to the hotel and the heartwarming sound of a scuffle breaking out. The paparazzi moved as one beast, pressing forward, pushing, lining up for a sniff of their prey. Someone moved from the darkness out into the street-lights and a volley of silver flashes greeted their arrival. A huge meatball of a bodyguard appeared from nowhere and a small guy in a new pair of Timberlands had his nose crushed to a crimson coulis by the lens of his own Leica.

They all had stepladders ready in case it was Prince. In the event the ladders were superfluous because the man who finally stepped into the glare of the lights was tall enough to be seen in any crowd.

‘Who the …?’

‘Shit, give us some space for Christssake. I was here first you know …’

The jostling became violent as the bodyguard leant his full weight to the crush. Squeezed like lemons, the paparazzi oozed a collective odour of Key West. The snapper’s foot found someone’s calf beneath it and he used it as the lever he needed to haul himself onto the wall behind.

The man in the middle of the crowd turned full-face and he recognized him at once; the chill wind of jealousy blew throughout his vitals.

‘Mik-Mak!’ The whisper went round. The paparazzi virtually slobbered with glee. Mik Veronsky, supersnapper. Exclusive, elusive and charismatic enough to be worth a few bob in the next day’s papers. The pages of Vogue and Tatler had been liberally peppered with shots of his face for the past month but now he was about to be captured for the benefit of the nation’s chip-wrappings and cat litter-tray linings, too.

The snapper swallowed hard and his camera dropped waist-high as his colleagues moved in for the kill.

Supersnapper – what the fuck did that mean? All it meant was that Mik Veronsky charged more to do less. And got to screw all the best women. It meant he was top barker in the whole pack of snivelling hounds. It also meant he was flavour of the month with the fashion journos. Mention his name to Lavender Allcock-Hopkins and a greedy, syrupy little smile would gather across her suet-white face. He raised his camera reluctantly and faffed around with the focus instead.

Mik had lost his rag now – he was really raging. He’d grabbed a nearby journo and was trying to tear the poor sod’s epiglottis out with his bare hands.

What was it that women saw in him? He was taller than necessary with wide shoulders and a skinny, demi-starved frame. His skin was vampire-white and his hair as black as the long coat he always wore. His outfit was de rigueur supersnapper: boots, jeans, acres of ethnic jewellery, stupid fucking hand-woven hat that looked like it had been stolen from some passing Kurd or other. Hair extensions? Did normal men have hair that far down their backs? And hadn’t it been cropped short last season? Eyes like angry dark stones.

Mik wasn’t handsome in the pipe-and-knitting-pattern sort of style, but he was, in a casual way, incredibly beautiful. Arty-farty, the snapper thought. All high fucking cheekbones and flared bloody nostrils. Then, of course, there was the voice. The accent: what Lavender Allcock-Hopkins described as multiply orgasmic.

The snapper looked back through his telephoto. Mik’s eyes were so dark you could barely see the definition between pupil and iris. There was a soft dent above his top lip and a small scar near his left eyebrow.

‘I don’t know what they all bloody see in him,’ he announced to anyone within earshot. He looked back again. There was a locket hanging around Mik’s neck, a plain silver one, nestling just along the watermark where the chest hairs started. Lockets weren’t in that season – everybody knew that. Press-prattle had it that it held something dear to Mik – something even that cold-hearted bastard cherished as a memento.

A body moved in front of Mik, blocking the snapper’s view, and he swore under his breath. He looked up to see who it was. Another photographer. It looked as though the prat was going to ask for a bloody autograph. The shame of the concept turned the snapper’s face scarlet.

A car backfired. Twice. Mik’s hair seemed to explode with the shock, rising up behind his head in serene and stately slow motion. The crush of bodies parted like the Red Sea. Mik stood alone now, frozen in grey space. The thought flashed through the snapper’s mind that maybe the pack had given up at last. Maybe a sense of the injustice of it all had finally permeated their crusty skulls. Mik had no talent as a photographer. He’d screwed his way to the top. He couldn’t tell a Nikon from a Box Brownie if his life depended on it. The game was up: the pack had rejected Mik Veronsky and all his hype.

The snapper watched with glee as Mik disintegrated with the lights of the press no longer upon him. People moved further back. Mik lurched towards them. He looked startled and amazed at their apparent lack of interest. His mouth opened and he screamed a name: ‘Andreas!’ There was an echo from other empty streets. Nonsense. Crap. The guy was all to pieces. Then the word was replaced by something else – something dark that spewed out of his mouth, splattering the bystanders. People moved back quickly in disgust, checking their clothes, wiping stains off their anoraks. All you could hear now was the shuffling and squeaking of Timberlands on wet pavement. There were a couple of screams, too.

Mik seemed to trip over nothing and began to fall, crumpling onto the concrete without a sound. Silence after that, total and profound.

Then suddenly the flashes began like applause after a great performance; not a quick volley of shots this time, but a barrage. No gaps between the silver light. The snapper’s mouth fell open but his hands would not move. Something seeped from beneath Mik’s fallen frame, something thicker and darker even than the rain.

The snapper knew then that his moment had come and passed him by: that split atom of a millisecond that fate offers up to everyone at some time in their meaningless little life, the one chance we all get either to make it or not. The photographer had blown it. He could have been famous. He could have been rich.

The moment had been his. He’d had the best view, the best angle, the best picture in his viewfinder. The irony of it was exquisite. Someone cannoned into his back and his camera rolled to the ground. He felt like jumping on it. Mik Veronsky had just been shot and all he’d done was stand there like a dickhead and watch.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER

It was good watching her work in the studio. Very good for an hour or two. Then maybe not so good for a while. After ten hours it was a clear descent into hell.

The trouble was, she was a perfectionist and perfect took time. Time cost money. Clients went from mildly nervous to deeply tense to totally, frenetically, bizarrely apeshit. They knew she was slow – everyone in the business knew she was slow – she was famous for it, but very few people knew exactly how slow. That was when the torture began.

Legend had it one client went completely bankrupt by the second day of a shoot. He could have stopped her, of course. He could have stood up there and then and told her that not only had his budget run out half-way through day one, but also that his entire year’s profits were at risk – yet he didn’t, and nobody blamed him. It would have been like stopping Michelangelo mid-brushstroke to explain your cash-flow problem as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Sometimes it was just easier to stock up on the Prozac and sweat it out.

She was rich, famous – she’d made it. Trading on past successes, maybe, but still a big name. Her studio complex was the size of an aircraft hangar and you got agoraphobic just walking round it. Like all true talents, though, she specialized in looking broke.

Watching her work you noticed the round bones of her spine that showed through her faded t-shirt like strung marbles as she hunched over the loaded camera. You saw how her long, wild sun-streaked hair got pushed dismissively back into an old rubber band she got from one of the paper boxes. When she was concentrating she would often pull a strand of hair down from the band to chew.

You heard nothing because she very rarely spoke and if she did it was in a whisper and you couldn’t hear what she said. After a while the soft puff and squeak of her sneakers as she crept almost soundlessly across the varnished floor, moving from pools of light into total darkness, would get on your nerves.

What you saw when you booked her for a shoot was a tall, youngish woman – not ugly, not plain, but not quite beautiful either – in the throes of an intense, all-consuming relationship with a handful of strobe lights and a beaten-up Rolleiflex. What you got was an illicit love affair with light that made you feel like a snoop even to be watching.

At thirty-five she had been at the top of her profession for several years, having hung there precariously owing to a mixture of driven ambition, technical perfection, and perpetual motion. Her name was legendary in the business and even photographers who trashed her work were in awe of her skill and her knowledge. She was not an instinctive worker – her pictures excited by their composition rather than their content.

She would frown all the time when she worked; it was only when she was finished that she would flash the famous grin, but by then you were too emotionally and financially drained to catch it.

The client that day was Japanese. He’d been warned about her working methods but his company was one of the largest in Japan and well up to the financial challenge. Besides, they wanted the best. The guy had foresight. He had a small roll-up bed with him, a portable TV for the Teletext and the number of an excellent local Japanese restaurant that delivered.

An hour after he’d settled behind the set the news of Mik’s shooting had flashed onto CNN and less than an hour after that he was informed his own shoot was in the can. No take-away sushi and no flies on the Futon.

His initial astonishment soon turned to anger, but when he went to speak to the photographer he found her staring into space and completely oblivious to anything around her. She looked so unwell he feared she might have had a stroke, but then the studio manager came to spirit him away and assure him that all was well and the job fairly completed. When he looked back the photographer still hadn’t moved. Maybe it was merely a display of the type of artistic behaviour the Americans were prone to. If the shots were no good he could always sue. But he still wasn’t sure she hadn’t had a stroke or a breakdown.

He bid her farewell and good luck just in case, and was extraordinarily relieved when she finally looked up and smiled and politely wished him the same in almost perfect Japanese.

1

Budapest 1981

The child was intrigued by a small speck of light that danced away somewhere deep in the heart of the darkness. He had been scared many times before but never so much that it hurt.

He wore a small plastic submarine pinned to the inside of his vest which was a medal for valour given to him by Father Janovsky for beating the shit out of Istvan Gosser, even though the boy had been armed with a knife. The trophy meant nothing today, though. Today his mouth felt like it was full of pitch and his heart was trying to punch its way out of his chest. If he had encountered Istvan Gosser down there in the dark he would have greeted him like a long-lost friend, and meant it, too.

The light squirmed some more. Perhaps it was a ghost – the soul of one of the newly dead. It might even be Andreas. The thought turned the boy’s knees to sponge. The place smelt funny. He wished he were somewhere else, somewhere with proper light. Anywhere. If he could have remembered his prayers he would have said them. Then a door opened from nowhere and he thought he would die from the shock.

The sudden glare startled him. The darkness felt almost better now. Dark was bad but that bright glare was a million times worse. Someone – not a ghost, because ghosts don’t wear rubber aprons and smell of tobacco – pushed past him and the door fell back almost shut again. The boy was quick, though, pushing his fingers between the crack and preventing the door from closing properly, even though it hurt. When the corridor was quiet he prised the door open. Then, with a quick glance around first to check he was unseen, he stepped inside.

The local mortuary was one vast, watery-smelling place that was tiled and lit like a public convenience. The bare bulbs strung in a line overhead made everyone look like a corpse whether they were dead or not. If the boy could have seen his own reflection in a mirror right then he would have made himself jump.

His face was whey-white with guilt and his hair, in contrast, looked black. The lights bleached the grime and dirt on his body so that he looked almost clean and his mouth had shrunk into a slit. It was hard for him to imagine he was above ground in that room. It was harder still for him to imagine he would ever get out of there alive.