I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

‘And suppose,’ I say, ‘without putting too fine a point on it, I tell you to kiss my mephitic ring-piece?’

Again there’s the possibility of a smirk from Uriel, but wooden Gabriel sticks to the facts. ‘You know, Lucifer, that in these matters there is no gainsaying His will.’

‘Dearest Gabrielala – aren’t you forgetting your histoire? I got where I am today by gainsaying His will. What’s He going to do? Go to war again over an East End tart?’

‘If need be. Do you think Michael sleeps, Lucifer? Or that Heaven’s armour is gone to rust?’

‘Old Thing I really must ask you: Why are you talking like such a sanctimonious ponce?’

‘He cannot truly want to come home,’ Zaphiel says. ‘If he wanted to come home he wouldn’t say these things.’

‘“He” is here, if you don’t mind. Of course I’m not coming home. Does any of you seriously think that this is anything more than a vacation for me? Do you know what hot buttered toast tastes like? Chocolate?’

‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much,’ Uriel says, and I nearly smack the cheeky rascal in the mouth. (If he and I hadn’t . . . If we weren’t . . . Well.) None the less it’s clear they’re ready to hang around indefinitely – poor Tracy still bent and half dry in the bathroom’s stopped steam – and since I don’t doubt they’re prepared to make an issue out of it I slip into Gunn’s Mecca-facing carcass (instant cessation of pain), give them the earthly finger and, as you say in Albion, fack orf aaad of it.

Now, Babs, any man will tell you: there’s nothing quite as simultaneously dispiriting and infuriating as getting yourself all ready to rape and murder someone only to be turned away by an unforeseen intercession at the last minute. It’s enough to make you want to rape and murder someone. (Bit rich, too, don’t you think, that He never bothers interceding with regular rapists, this charming old God who only wants the best for you?) But sometimes it takes a setback to clear your vision.

It actually broke me up. I sat in the back of the cab and grabbed my knees and laughed my slow-on-the- uptake head damn near clean off. Eighty grand in the bank and I’m living in a City ex-council with no cable or power shower and a kitchen the size of a teabag. Oh I laughed, I did. So funny I could have gouged Gunn’s eyeballs out and tossed them into the road.

Cabby didn’t appreciate it, mind you. One too many rearview checks till I took out a slender wad of fifties and waved them at him. He was . . . well, he was a London taxi driver: double-chinned with a dark grey comb-over, ear-fluff, jowls like past-it potatoes, Popeye forearms and a boil like a ruby on the back of his neck. Further down I knew there’d be the no-surrender gut, the fat bollock bulge, the waxy bum crack and haemorrhoidal punnet . . . but I preferred not to dwell on it. My threads had confused him (I’ve revolutionized Gunn’s wardrobe: Armani black single-breasted pinstripe, white silk shirt, red paisley tie, Gucci Royalles and three-quarter black leather overcoat from Versace); it was hard for him to believe that you could be dressed like that and still be a giggling nutter – but the sterling calmed him. ‘Fuck Clerkenwell,’ I told him, sliding a crisp note through the vent. ‘Take me to the Ritz.’

‘You mine me arskin what you do for a livin’, chief?’ when we pulled up at the yellow-lit facade.

‘I tempt people to do the wrong thing,’ I said.

He seemed happy with this. Tight-lipped, he closed his eyes and nodded, vigorously, as if I’d confirmed his intuition (advertising, politics, the law). And well might he, since it was only by a miracle of self-control that I didn’t add: Your wife, Sheila, for example, who is at this very moment swallowing the hot and curdy jism of your brother Terry, with whom she’s been enjoying gladiatorial carnal relations for the past eighteen months, my son. Wasn’t mercy (naturally) held me back. Just the vision of him following me into reception and making a scene.

No bags. They love that. Suggestion of whim, flight, drama or verboten coupling. (Which, illicit or otherwise, was still very much at the forefront of my mind, Julia Sommerville’s plummy voice and Tracy’s rendition of ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ having between them got my blood up awfully, at long last.)

At my suite’s snooker table-sized mirror I stood and opened my arms with a smile, the Vegas crooner’s gesture of wordless love in the face of his standing ovation. Spoiled it, somewhat, I admit, by saying aloud: ‘Now this, my son, is a bit more fucking like it,’ but I could hardly blame myself, overwhelmed, as I was, with a deep sense of homecoming.

I sent my threads down to housekeeping for a wash and brush up, then eased myself into an excessively foamed, oiled and salted bath, congratulating myself on having invented money in the first place. Wealth breeds boredom and boredom breeds vice; poverty breeds anger and anger breeds vice. More than enough of the angelic me endured to feel it in the hotel’s costly air; more than enough of the corporeal me to sniff – in the way of charming perceptual correlates – its practitioners’ scents of perfume and aftershave, breath and broken wind laced with the tang and spice of pricey ingestions. (Money calibrates society’s scale of smells, and naturally the folks I’d glimpsed about the place were loaded. I haven’t had to touch most of them (professionally) with a barge pole, since they’ve had money from birth. That’s the beauty of money: the only graft I’ve got to put in is getting people to acquire it. Once they have acquired it, and the freedom it brings, most of them (and their beneficiaries) will go straight off the rails without so much as a bitten nail.) Money was my leap out of the Dark Ages.

Humans and human needs lay hid in night.

I said: ‘Let money be!’ and all was light.

The key to evil? Freedom. The key to freedom? Money. For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do . . .

Not entirely inappropriate then that when, having decided on a tall Tom Collins in the bar (beverage to augment deliberation over how many escorts – okay, rape and murder were off but for Christ’s sake I was damned if I wasn’t going to put my lately acquired love-truncheon to some use), an exhausted posh female voice should say, from two stools away: ‘You don’t look like you do anything for a living.’

I turned. Recognized her straight away. Harriet Marsh. Lady Harriet Marsh, you’d think, what with the bevelled vowels and Susanna-York-on-smack looks. Sixty years old now (quite a while since I’d last seen her) with a freckled body of complicated wiriness under a black halter-neck cocktail dress. Magnificently bored green eyes. Hair dyed a colour between platinum and pale pink, pinned up, with wispy bits dangling. The odd liver spot. Brazenly crafted Los Angeles teeth. Lady Harriet, you’d think – but you’d be wrong. It’s not blood, it’s money. Harriet plucked from a glittering clutch of possibles forty years ago, bedded and betrothed in that order to Texan Leonard ‘Lube’ Whallen (no blood, either, obviously, but a large family of hyperactive oil wells) who, thanks to some colourful experiences with an early years nanny from Dorset, had a crippling weakness for English gals who knew how to boss him about in the sack. The thing to do, I’d murmured to Harriet at the time, is make him earn it. I told him it would take him to the deepest knowledge of himself, to give himself over to her completely. He believed me, looking at his own porous and moustached face in the morning mirror, astonished and grimly delighted. One by one family members written out of the will. Harriet wasn’t going back: the beery two-up-two-down in Hackney, the dodgy dad and threadbare mum, the wireless, the Woodbines . . . She’d been in for the long haul with Leonard, but he’d surprised her in 1972 by dying of a heart-attack (four Jack Daniels, devilled prawns, three injudicious Monte Christos and a dash across the baked apron to make the private jet’s take-off slot), leaving her more or less sole inheritor. I let her go after that. She wouldn’t need me. She worked well on her own. Now – oh, honestly, I’m gifted, I am – she owns thirty per cent of Nexus Films.

‘You don’t look like you do anything for a living.’ Yes. The blunt gambit entitlement of the rich and the beautiful. Candour a match for my own.

‘I do something for a living,’ I said.

‘Really? What?’

‘I’m the Devil.’

‘How nice for you.’

‘Currently in possession of a mortal frame, as you see.’

‘I do see.’

‘And you’re Harriet Marsh, widow of Leonard Whallen.’