Kill Your Friends by John Niven Read Free Book Online Page B

looks at it—at the spines, tendrils and tentacles, the
claws, wobbling antennae and glistening jet eyes of dozens of dead
crustaceans. He looks up and says to the beaming waiter, “Are you
having a fucking giraffe, cunt?”
    ♦
    Midnight in the lobby bar of the Martinez. There must be at
least three hundred people in here—a boiling scrum of booze and
noise and networking. Business cards are constantly exchanged,
phone numbers scribbled on napkins and punched into mobiles. People
hold imaginary receivers up to their ears and mouth ‘Call me’
across the room while others throw their heads back and unleash
torrents of horrible laughter. The roar of forced bonhomie is
deafening. Massively outnumbered, a handful of melting,
white-jacketed waiters squeeze through the crush with silver trays,
bearing bottles of Krug, Cristal, San Miguel, Budweiser, Heineken,
Stoli and Johnnie Walker. A beer costs about eight quid. To have a
bottle of Scotch or vodka left on your table will cost you about
three hundred. Plenty of people are happily paying that rather than
trying to tag an exhausted, near-fainting waiter every fifteen
minutes.
    Dinner had been the usual deal you fall into over here, with
fourteen of us sharing a table at a seafood place on the Croisette:
Chardonnay, champagne, cognac, cocaine and untouched food. Swearing
and shouting and braying laughter. Elderly customers asking to be
moved then the tightly smiling maître d’ and the trio of harassed
waiters hunched over the metre-long bill and the stack of credit
cards and francs we’ve flicked onto the ruined tablecloth.
    Trellick and I have shouldered our way in at the bar, passing
close to Parker-Hall and Marty Kersch, a senior Vice President at
Capitol in LA. Parker-Hall—as I knew he would—nodded politely but
made no move to introduce me or bring me into the conversation, in
fact, I watched as he quickly thought of some detailed, urgent
question he had to put to Kersch and leaned in close to yell it
until I passed by. This is SOP; if you are engaged in a visible,
centre-of-the-room, high-profile conversation with someone very
powerful then you must jealously protect that conversation from
interlopers of your own, or lower, stature. Conversely, had
Parker-Hall been talking to some muppet—some guy who works in
marketing for some tiny French dance label whom he had mistakenly
fallen into conversation with—he would have greeted me like a
long-lost brother, brought me into the discussion, and then fucked
off leaving me with the muppet. And I would do the same to him in a
heartbeat.
    “How was Rage by the way?” Trellick asks me.
    “The usual.”
    “And the album?”
    “He reckons it’ll blow our tits off.”
    “Mmmm, odd that.”
    “I know. Pompous cunt. Just out of interest,” I say, lowering my
voice, “for argument’s sake, ”
    “Go on.”
    “Let’s assume the new Rage album is a pile of shit.
Unsellable.”
    “Assume away.”
    “What’s that going to do to Schneider’s position?”
    “Death row. Game over.”
    “So if, when, Schneider goes…”
    “Who’s in the frame for Head of A & R?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, it’s not fucking rocket science. It’s either you or
Waters, or they go out of house.”
    “Do a Duke of Wellington on Waters.”
    “Pros: a couple of years older than you, a little more
experienced in making albums, the rank and file think he’s a nice
bloke. Cons…he’s a lazy, brain-dead, cocaine addict with the
attention span of a fucking gnat who hasn’t had a hit record in
donkey’s.”
    “So he could get the job?”
    “Definitely.”
    I try to run a few Waters-as-my-boss scenarios through my head:
Waters shouting at me because we’ve missed out on some deal. Waters
calling me into meetings, locking me out of meetings with important
managers and heads of departments, Waters sending me off to, I
don’t know, fucking Stoke on a Saturday night to see some band. But
I don’t get very far with picturing any of