Popcorn

Chapter Thirty Five

Inside the house Bruce found himself sitting on the couch between Scout and Wayne. The camera was directly in front of him and he was staring down the barrel. He knew he was about to enter the national consciousness as a patsy, a pathetic loser, coerced and abused into making a snivelling, nevertobeforgotten, cowardly confession on live TV.

He would be like those combat pilots who are shot down by foreign dictators and then trotted out the next day, drugged and bleary, to renounce the US and profess allegiance to their adopted country. Everybody knows those guys have no choice, that they have been coerced, but somehow people never feel quite the same way about them afterwards. You can’t just forget it when your hero suddenly and publicly denies every principle he has ever held dear. There is a secret feeling that he should have fallen on his sword. Unfair and unreasonable, of course, but none the less there.

Bruce struggled to master his panic and anguish.

‘ Wayne, this isn’t going to work,’ he pleaded. ‘You’re both hated murderers and one single statement from me, made under duress, won’t change that. All it’ll do is screw up my life for ever.’

‘Well that’s a shame, Bruce, because it’s the best shot I’ve got and we’re going to try it. Bill? Kirsten? Everything ready?’

‘Yes it is, boss,’ said Bill, who had deduced rightly that Wayne would enjoy being called ‘boss’.

Bruce decided the time had come to make a desperate pitch, one he had been considering ever since the camera crew had arrived. He turned and tried to look Wayne in the eye – not an easy thing to do when you’re sitting next to someone on a deep, soft couch.

‘Debate me,’ he said.

‘Say what?’

‘Debate me.’

Wayne frowned; he didn’t understand. Bruce hurried to establish his idea.

‘Listen, Wayne. You’re not stupid, and neither is Scout. You know that the best you have here is a long shot. You know, deep down, that me sitting here with a gun at my head, claiming reponsibility for your actions, is not necessarily going to cut a lot of ice.’

‘Like I say, it’s all we got,’ Wayne said. ‘OK, Bill let’s-’

Bruce pushed on. ‘It isn’t. It isn’t all you’ve got. You could take a risk. Debate me, prove your point without coercion. Establish your case live on TV.’

‘You be careful, Wayne.’ Scout was uneasy. ‘You got a plan, you stick to it.’

‘Come on, Scout.’ Bruce twisted round on the couch to face her. ‘Think what you were saying earlier – all that stuff about me exploiting the ugly and the downtrodden, how I get rich leeching off the suffering of the poor. That’s a better argument than just using me as some kind of puppet. Put your case. Establish my guilt and let me deny it. Think what extraordinary television it would make… You guys could be real stars, not just blackmailing hoodlums but proper participants. Stars.’

‘Stars?’ said Scout. That had got her.

‘Of course stars. It’s obvious. The public loves a fighter.’

Bruce had to win them round. He knew this was his chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, to turn himself from a victim into a hero, to be the man who stood by his principles even when the very forces of darkness and reaction had invaded his own home. To be the man who gave America its wakeup call establishing for once and for all that ‘We are all responsible for our own actions’ – particularly violent criminals.

‘Think about it, Wayne,’ Bruce said. ‘I represent the cultural élite of this country. You represent the dispossessed, the underclass, the lowest group in society. What a confrontation, what an image!’

‘Yeah, and what’s in it for you, mister?’ Scout was no pushover. She had already demonstrated in her terrifying defeat of Brooke that she was not to be taken in.

‘I get my chance to refute your allegations. I get a chance to present you as the independently minded, personally responsible murdering maniacs that I believe you to be.’

‘Daddy, be nice,’ Velvet pleaded, but Bruce did not even hear her.

‘That’s the risk you take,’ he continued. ‘Put your case, see if you can beat mine. If you win, you really win: the nation will never forget you or forgive me. If you lose, I honestly don’t think you’re any worse off.’

‘Don’t do it, hon. Your plan’s better. Just make him say the stuff.’

But Wayne was intrigued. ‘Well, I don’t know, babe. I mean, I think we’ve got a pretty good argument here. Let’s face it, half the Republican Party plus just ‘bout every preacher in the country reckons Bruce here’s the devil incarnate…’

For the umpteenth time that terrible night, Bruce allowed himself a moment of hope. ‘Think of your image, Scout,’ he said. ‘What do you want that camera to see? A couple of sullen thugs on a couch, or goodlooking, articulate antiheroes? If you survive all this and avoid the chair, you’ll be on every teen Tshirt in the country. You’ll be able to name your price.’

This was the right button to press for Scout.

‘You really think we’ll be stars?’

‘Of course you will. This is national TV. Win or lose, half the country’s going to fall in love with you. In actual fact you can’t lose.’

‘You want to be a star, baby doll?’

‘Of course I do, honey, but… Oh, I don’t know…’

Meanwhile the outside world was getting impatient, and poor Kirsten, the recordist, crouching in her underwear in front of Bruce’s fireplace, was getting the sharp end of their anger.

‘What the hell is going on, Kirsten?’ The producer’s voice screamed along the cable link and into her headset radio receiver. ‘When are we going to see some pictures?’

The producer completely ignored the delicate nature of Kirsten’s situation, demanding, as TV producers often do, that everyone be told to jump to the command of the cameras. In some ways it was not his fault. He had a whole line of senior producers, editors, section chiefs and channelcontrollers crushed into his ENG truck, not to mention the chief of the LAPD, accompanied by an angry man in a flakjacket who kept muttering, ‘Bullshit. Bulldoubleshit.’ Outside the truck there were countless more police and media operatives milling around, and all of them, inside and out, were demanding that the producer punch up some visuals pronto.

‘What’s going on, Kirsten? Talk to me,’ he shouted into Kirsten’s headset. ‘We have over two hundred stations nationwide requesting footage, and all the majors have crashed into their schedules. We can’t broadcast pictures of the outside of his house for ever. The studio anchors are running out of crap…’

The studio anchors were indeed getting a little desperate.

‘Our cameras are still located outside the Delamitri mansion,’ Larry and Susan were able to confirm for the millionth time. ‘And we have with us an expert on the exteriors of celebrity homes. Doctor Ranulph Tofu, of the New Age Academy of Astral Learning, will be able to give us a reading on Bruce Delamitri’s state of mind, based principally on the colour of his garage doors.’

In the control truck they were tearing out their hair.

‘What are we waiting for, Kirsten?’

The producer got no reply. Kirsten heard him but said nothing, so he kept on shouting, turning up the volume until Kirsten’s head shook.

‘How long does this jerk think we can tie up the networks on his behalf? Ask the asshole what he thinks he’s doing.’

In his desire to make TV, the producer was forgetting that Kirsten was ten feet away from a mass murderer. She rightly felt that to ask the asshole what he thought he was doing was not tactically the right way to go about things. But she had to say something, if only because, after ten minutes of her producer’s voice screaming directly into her brain, a bullet in the head was beginning to look like a reasonable option.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, trying to appear as detached an observer as possible, ‘the people in vision control are asking what kind of timescale we’re looking at here. Just so they can give you the very best coverage they can. They don’t want to lose the audience we’ve built up.’

Wayne looked at Bruce and made a decision. ‘You want to debate me, Bruce? Let’s do it.’

‘And will you let Farrah and Velvet go afterwards? Will you let Brooke get to a doctor?’

‘Maybe. I never know what I’m gonna do, Bruce. It’s my job: I’m a maniac.’

Kirsten finally spoke into her talkback. ‘Stand by in the truck.’ She turned to Wayne. ‘OK, Mr Hudson, they’re ready whenever.’ She was desperate to get out of that room and into some clothes.

‘You ready, Scout?’ Wayne enquired. ‘Ready to be a TV star?’

Suddenly Scout realized the enormity of what they were about to do. She hadn’t checked her hair, her makeup, her clothes… ‘Oh Wayne, I look a sight. Can they send in someone to do makeup?’

‘You look gorgeous, honey. Brooke did your hair just peachy. Are you ready, Bruce?’

‘Yes I am, Wayne.’

‘Can I give control a picture?’ Kirsten asked.

Wayne said she could, and Bill turned his camera on.

‘Speed,’ said Bill. Kirsten flicked a switch. In the control van ten screens jumped into life and the assembled opinionformers finally got what they wanted.