Chapter Seven
From his second story bedroom hovering over Selden Canyon, Burke Melchior could see a slice of the blue Pacific between the hills. He stretched luxuriously, sitting up in his Louis XIV four-poster, inhaling the crisp scent of eucalyptus on the morning breeze. Like him, eucalyptus was not native to the United States. It had come from Australia and pretty much taken over the west-facing slopes of the state.
Melchior had come from England as a brash, twenty-eight-year-old hustler representing a handful of Brit bands and had clawed his way to the pinnacle. Melchior and Associates represented dozens of the most important acts in show biz, specializing in stadium rock. While Lilith Tour, and even the Rolling Stones, played to half-empty stadiums, Melchior’s acts packed them in. His clients included Grimjack, Strontium 90, and Charon. Charon was currently embarked on a sixteen-city tour of Europe due to play Berlin the next evening.
Melchior used to go on the road with his acts, but he had fewer clients back then, less clout, and more time. Now he was an industry. A Godfather of Hollywood. A-list actors and top producers came to him hat in hand. “Godfather, be my friend?” An Oscar for Best Movie graced the Tudor bedroom’s fireplace mantle beneath a pair of crossed cutlasses. Disco, the story of a boy and his dog. Melchior had enough gold records to tile a foyer larger than most people’s apartments.
The enticing scent of fresh roast coffee drifted in on the morning breeze. Melchior glanced at the slight indentation made by Melissa, his twenty-four-year-old live-in girlfriend. A keeper. He had a nice little project lined up for her, a slasher film called Helmet Head, about a seven-foot-tall motorcyclist, dressed all in black leather, who slices off the heads of other cyclists with his samurai sword. Melchior didn’t kid himself that Melissa was Katherine Hepburn or even Marisa Tomei, but in the right project, in the right costume, she would drive the fan boys crazy. He planned to unveil her at the San Diego Comic-Con International in July.
She could even sing a little.
“Melissa baby!” he called from the bed in a faint Cockney accent which he’d never bothered to disguise despite what Geffen told him. “Coffee?”
“Just a sec, hon,” echoed from down the hall. Shivering in the morning chill, Melchior pulled on a Lakers’ hoodie lying next to the bed. Even on the hottest days the house remained cool, manufacturing its own shadow. In the mild Southern California winter, the house verged on freezing. Melchior saved big-time on air conditioning bills but lost it during the winter.
Seconds later, Melissa appeared in a diaphanous blue kimono, pure sex, carrying a silver tray with two steaming mugs of shade-grown Sumatran coffee and a cell phone.
“Babe, there’s a guy on the line, Ian St. James, says he’s an old friend of yours, and he has to talk to you.”
Melchior swung his hairy legs over the side of the bed. He was a fur-covered mesomorph of Serbian extraction. A gold Star of David nestled in his curly steel chest hair. Daily workouts with a personal trainer kept his sixty-five-year-old gut at bay. His perfect teeth represented state of the art dentistry. Not only were they the whitest white, they glowed in the dark. He had shaved his muscular bare skull, surrounded at ear level by a smoke-colored shadow.
His gray/green eyes widened in surprise. “Ian St. James? You’re having me on.” He reached for the phone. “Ian! How the fuck are you?”
“I’m in Berlin, Burke. The Banshees are back.”
Melchior pasted a silly grin across his face, default setting for when he was gobsmacked. For an instant, his stomach lurched, and he had that sick feeling he had once in Simpson’s Lear trying to land in Phoenix during a thunderstorm, when the plane hit a downdraft and lost all gravity and control for a second, and Melchior had been convinced he was going to die. He swallowed the sick feeling and straightened his head.
“Excuse me?”
Melchior heard St. James take a breath. “I saw them last night at the Phoenix Club in Prague. Go to their website. Look it up. They’re playing the K-99 Club tomorrow night in Friedrichshain. I saw them, Burke. They bloody well looked like the band!”
“Looked like the band how?” Melchior asked, more to fill space than from honest inquiry. St. James’ absurd statement had upset the delicate balance of spinning plates Melchior kept in his head. It did not compute. The Banshees had been Melchior’s first act, the first astonishing success that led to everything else. Of course, nothing good is ever free. The Banshees had also been the source of unending grief over the years, from the church and synagogue condemnations to the endless lawsuits. The League of Decency for Christ’s fucking sake! If they could come back from the dead, why not the Banshees? Melchior tried not to think about the Banshees. But, of course, he thought about them every day.
Maybe he was still asleep. Unfortunately, Burke Melchior was far too hard-nosed to fall for the old “it was all a dream” sequence. That’s why he’d passed on producing Shelter Island.
“I mean,” St. James said through clenched teeth, “it was the bloody band as if they hadn’t aged a day! Either that or spittin’ fuckin’ images of them.”
“Did you take pictures?” Melchior said, trying to process this information. The Banshees? Was it a joke? Had years of drug use finally turned St. James into a full-bore paranoid schizophrenic? What did he expect Melchior to do about it? Melchior had gone to bat for St. James once too often. The man was a tosser and a drug addict, and was stalling for an explanation. Melchior couldn’t go on bailing out this schlimazel forever, no matter what the boy’s father had meant to him.
“I don’t have a cell phone anymore. I’m using a pay phone.”
“Are you on drugs?”
“Some bastard slipped me a mickey last night, that’s the only drug I’m on. Still can’t shake the cotton.”
“Are you drinking?”
“Come on, Burke! This isn’t about my sad ass life! I know I sound crazy, but I’m not. I’ve never been crazy. Stupid and stubborn, maybe, but not crazy! There’s something going on here—they looked like fuckin’ clones! And the music, the music was perfect! You need to get your bum out here and take a look.”
Melchior glanced at his watch. It was eleven. He had a one o’clock with Serafin at the Trai-San Asian Grill in Santa Monica. “Give me a number where you can be reached. I’ll call you back in an hour.”
“Okay, listen. I’ve got a little money, I’ll buy a cell phone and give you the number. Who was that answered the phone? Your new bird?”
“Melissa. Are you all right, Ian? Seriously.”
“I’m a bit hyper. Who wouldn’t be, seeing their father as he was as a lad?”
“Do you realize how crazy that sounds?”
“There’s something happening here. I don’t understand it. Last night when I tried to get backstage to see if it was really them, this Russian fucker slipped me a mickey and set me up to get crushed in a fuckin’ car compactor, if you can believe that. I barely escaped.”
St. James’ story just kept getting crazier. He’d never been one of those crash and burn sorts who, unable to exist in the glare of their celebrity fathers, either committed suicide or killed somebody in a car or boat crash. Ian had always struck Melchior as one of the more grounded celebrity scions, possibly because he’d been spared his father’s drunken debauchery during his formative years. Melchior knew from personal experience that having a father was no guarantee of a happy childhood.
Was it better to have a drunk, irresponsible, drug-addicted and possibly Satan-worshiping father or no father at all?
“Are you all right?” Melchior said again.
“I’m fine. Listen. Write this down. Kaspar Sinaiko.”
Melchior snapped his fingers at Melissa who sat in a salon chair sipping coffee from an enormous mug. Melchior mimed writing. Melissa picked up a pen from the dressing table next to her and tossed it to Melchior who caught it one-handed. He peeled off a Post-it note from a stack on the headrest. “Okay—go ahead.”
St. James spelled the man’s name.
“I’ll look into it. In the meantime, hang tight.”
“I’ll be waiting,” St. James said.