Popcorn

now, do we? It might affect the ratings.’

Scout was absolutely thrilled. ‘Are we really going to be on the TV, honey?’

‘Yes, we are, baby doll, and so’s Bruce here, because if he doesn’t I’ll kill his darling little girl.’

‘What kind of statement? What the hell do you want me to say?’

‘Well, Bruce, let me tell you. You are going to announce to the whole of the USA – and believe me it will be the whole of the USA because between you and us we got more celebrity right here than Elvis making out with Oprah, using Roseanne for a mattress – you are going to announce to the whole of the USA that Scout ‘n’ me are your fault.’

Wayne smiled as if to say, ‘Great plan, huh?’ Bruce had known it was coming but it was still a blow.

‘You are going to say that having met us and talked to us, quietly, person to person, one on one, you realize that we are just dumb, stupid, poor white trash and that you and your glamorous Hollywood pictures done corrupted our po’ simple minds.’ He took up the bag which had recently contained the severed head and pulled out a bundle of bloodstained magazines and newspapers. He quoted from one: ‘You’re going to say you understand that your “wicked, cynical exploitation and manipulation of the lowest, basest elements of the human psyche has so disturbed-” ’

‘No, I won’t do it!’ Bruce nearly gagged at the man’s audacity.

Wayne ’s strolled across the room to where Velvet had gone to stand with her mother. ‘Open your mouth, darling.’

Velvet burst into tears again. Unmoved, Wayne took his pistol and forced its barrel between Velvet’s closed lips so that the metal pressed against her clenched teeth.

‘I’ll bet you’ve had a lot of expensive dental work over the years, huh, baby? Let me tell you now, a bullet going through all that is liable to do a powerful lot of damage.’

Having made his point, Wayne removed his gun from Velvet’s lips, turned back to Bruce and waved the bloodied magazines in his face.

‘You, Bruce, are going to say that we are “products of a society that celebrates violence”. You are going to say that we are weakwilled, simpleminded creatures who have been “seduced by images of sex and death”, images you create, man, and for which you have just been honoured with an Oscar. You are going to say that your eyes have been opened and you are ashamed. In fact, I got an idea, man – oh yeah! You’re going to return your Oscar. Live on TV, you’re going to give it back out of respect for your victims. The people you killed through me and Scout.’

Bruce was not a callous man. He knew that other people had problems greater than his. He was aware that two people were already dead and that another was clearly dying. Nevertheless, at this point he could think only of the dreadful fate Wayne had prepared for him. To make the kind of statement Wayne was proposing that he make, and to make it to the entire nation, would be the most profoundly humiliating thing imaginable. Career suicide. Intellectual disgrace. The complete loss of every ounce of the credibility he currently enjoyed. The immediate end of his life as an artist. And for a lie.

He struggled to find an argument to sway Wayne from his terrible course. ‘It won’t work, Wayne. It can’t. Whatever I say, it won’t change the law. You’re guilty and the law will get you.’

‘That’s bullshit, Bruce, and you know it. The law is whatever people want it to be. It ain’t never the same thing twice. It’s one thing to a white man, another to a black, one thing to the rich, another to the poor. The law is a piece of fuckin’ Play Dough – no one knows what shape it’s going to be in next. Man, after you’ve made your broadcast me and Scout here won’t be no punk killers no more. We’ll be a hundred things. We’ll be heroes to some, victims to others, we’ll be monsters, we’ll be saints. We will be the defining fuckin’ image of a national debate. A debate which will go to the very core of our society.’

Wayne ’s eyes shone with the glory of his idea. He assumed the deep, censorious tone of the typical TV news anchor: ‘ America will look at itself and ask itself the questions “Who are we? Where are we going? Did Wayne and Scout act alone? Is Bruce Delamitri to blame, or do we all share something of their guilt?” ’

Scout just loved it when Wayne was on a roll. He was so classy. ‘Defining image’, ‘core of society’ – those were real tendollar sentences. She never knew how he picked all that stuff up. Like her, he’d left school at the first opportunity, which was about three years before he was legally entitled to do so. Since then all he’d done was hang out and watch TV like everyone else in the country.

Which was, of course, the point.

Wayne had been watching TV his entire life, and it had not all been sit coms and reruns of Star Trek. Decades of surfing the remote had meant a million bites out of the Discovery Channel, CNN, Oprah and Sixty Minutes, a neverending diet of ‘information’ and ‘indepth analysis’. With their inexhaustible supply of doctors, therapists, psychologists and ‘experts’ of every type, news and chat shows have introduced entire nations to the instantcoffee version of a vocabulary of words and ideas that traditionally take years of study to acquire.

An intelligent man is going to pick up an awful lot of earnest bullshit and portentous psychobabble if he watches TV his entire life; and Wayne, as Bruce was discovering, was a very intelligent man.

Because Bruce knew that Wayne was right. Right, right, RIGHT. A villain could get turned into a hero inside a single soundbite. And, as in Bruce’s case, a hero could end up a villain.

He attempted a defence of sorts. ‘Oh yeah. Well, what happens when I go on the TV tomorrow and retract everything? When I tell the world you forced me into accepting responsibility?’

Scout didn’t think Bruce was giving Wayne sufficient credit for his brilliant plan. ‘You might be dead by then, Mr Big Shot,’ she said. ‘You might be dead any time.’

Wayne laughed. ‘You tell him, baby. But frankly it don’t matter what you say tomorrow, Bruce – always assuming you’re alive to say it. By tomorrow our little story here will have a life of its own. Every talk show, every paper, will be asking the question “Who’s guilty?” Whatever you say tomorrow won’t wipe out today. This is the image, man. This is the defining moment, the one they’ll all remember – bigger than the Rodney King video, bigger than O.J.’s committal, bigger than the Kennedy motorcade.’

‘Hey, don’t undersell yourself, Wayne,’ said Bruce through gritted teeth.

‘Come on, man! It doesn’t get any better than this. The king of Hollywood, two mass murderers, a dying Playboy centrefold, a rinsedout old hag of an exwife, a spoilt, sexy little weeping teen… blood, guns… we’ve got it all. Nobody will ever forget this. It’ll be burnt into their minds for ever.’

Wayne walked up to Bruce and put his face right up close. ‘And every time anyone sees you, Bruce, they’ll remember this image above all the others. They’ll remember you with your arms round me and Scout, your daughter weeping, your girlfriend bleeding at your feet. And you saying, ‘ America, wake up! We sow a wind and we reap a whirlwind. These two poor benighted sinners could be kin to anyone of us. They are my kin. My son and daughter. I begot them. My sins were visited upon them…’

‘Now, how ‘bout that drink?’

Chapter Thirty

Oliver and Dale had been in their studio conference room, preparing to present that morning’s edition of Coffee Time, when the call came.

‘I need highprofile personalities central to the action,’ the head of NBC News and Current Affairs had demanded, ‘anchoring not from the studio, but from inside the story. The nation needs a friend in that house.’

Murray had already won the battle to be the station which would provide the crew for Wayne ’s broadcast. ‘We were the company of contact and we should have priority,’ he had pointed out rather pompously to the other networks, adding, ‘What’s more, if you don’t let us do it I shan’t tell you what their demands are, so the people you send in will get it all wrong and get killed.’

Having achieved the priority he desired, Murray had only to persuade Oliver and Dale, in whose celebrity the station had so much invested, that they should be the station’s representatives at the centre of the drama. He didn’t have much time. Wayne had demanded only a camera operator and a recordist, there had been no talk of presenters. Dale and Oliver would have to do the work of the technicians. They would need to be told how to use the equipment and the minutes were ticking away.