Susan Phillips - Glitter Baby

She sipped, too. “A little.” Also Italian and Spanish.

Stu leaned back in his chair. “The job pays two hundred a week, room and board provided. You interested?”

She had a job waiting tables in Lille. She had her classes and a cheap room, and she no longer did anything impulsively. But this felt safe. Different. She could handle it for a month or so. She didn’t have anything better to do. “I’ll take it.”

Stu whipped out a business card. “Pack your suitcase and meet me at the Intercontinental in an hour and a half.” He scrawled something on the card and rose. “Here’s the suite number. Tell Parker I’ll see him there.”

Parker came back to the table, and Fleur told him what had happened. He laughed. “You can’t have that job.”

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t stick it. I don’t know what Stu told you, but being road secretary to any band is a hard job, and with a band like Neon Lynx it’s even tougher.”

There it was, the open acknowledgment that she wasn’t worth anything without Belinda. She should leave and forget all about this, but what had been nothing more than an impulse had suddenly become important. “I’ve had tough jobs.”

He patted her hand patronizingly. “Let me explain something. One of the reasons Neon Lynx has stayed on top is because they’re spoiled, arrogant bastards. It’s their image, and, frankly, I encourage it. Their arrogance is a big part of what makes them so great when they perform. But it also makes them impossible to work for. And road secretary isn’t what you’d call a high-prestige job. Let’s face it. You’re used to giving orders, not taking them.”

A lot Parker Dayton knew. She dug in with a stubbornness she’d forgotten she possessed. “I can handle it.”

The man who didn’t have a sense of humor laughed again. “You wouldn’t last an hour. I don’t know what happened with you three years ago, but you screwed yourself pretty good. Here’s some free advice. Take a pass on the bread and cookies, then call Gretchen and get yourself back in front of the cameras.”

She stood up. “Stu Kaplan can hire his own road secretary, right?”

“Under normal circumstances, but…”

“Okay, then. He offered me the job, and I’m taking it.”

She was out of the restaurant before he could say anything more, but halfway down the street she had to lean against the side of a building to catch her breath. What was she doing? She told herself this was safe, nothing more than a secretary’s job, but her heart rate refused to slow down.

When she walked into the suite at the Intercontinental an hour later, she felt as if she’d walked into Bedlam. A group of reporters was talking to Parker and two extravagantly dressed young men she assumed were band members. Waiters wheeled in trays of food, and three phones rang at the same time. The insanity of what she’d done hit her full force. She had to get out of here, but Stu had already picked up two of the phones and was gesturing for her to pick up the third.

She answered with an unsteady voice. It was the manager of the Munich hotel where the group was staying the next night. He told her he’d heard rumors about the destruction of two hotel suites in London and regretted to inform her that Neon Lynx was no longer welcome at his establishment. She put her hand over the receiver and told Stu what had happened.

Within seconds, she realized that the pleasant Stu Kaplan of the coffee shop was not the same man standing in front of her. “Tell him it was Rod Stewart, for chrissake! Use your freakin’ head, and don’t bother me with the little shit.” He tossed a clipboard at her, smacking her in the knuckles. “Double-check the arrangements while you got him on the phone. Double-check everything, and then check it again.”

Her stomach clenched. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t work at a job with someone screaming at her and expecting her to know things that had never been explained. Parker Dayton gave her a smug smile with I-told-you-so written all over it. As she turned away from him, she caught sight of her reflection across the room. The mirror that hung above the sofa was the same size as those blown-up photographs Belinda had hung on the apartment walls in New York. Those oversized, beautiful faces had never seemed to belong to her. But neither did the pasty, tense reflection staring back at her.

She tightened her damp palms around the receiver. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but you can’t blame Neon Lynx for damage they didn’t do.” Her voice sounded thin from lack of air. She took a quick breath, then began a systematic assassination of Rod Stewart’s character. When she was done, she launched into a determined review of the room assignments from the instructions on the clipboard, then went on to detail arrangements for luggage carts and food. As the manager relayed the instructions back to her, and she realized she’d convinced him to change his mind, she felt a rush of satisfaction far out of proportion to what she’d done.

She hung up the phone, and it rang again. One of the roadies had been busted for drugs. This time she was prepared for Stu’s yelling.

“For chrissake, don’t you know how to handle anything?” He grabbed his jacket. “Take care of things here while I get the son of a bitch out of jail. And I’m telling you right now…Those motherfucking Austrian police had better speak English.” He pitched another clipboard at her. “Here’s the schedule and the assignments. Get those stage passes stamped for the VIPs and call Munich to make sure they’ve taken care of transportation from the airport. We were short on limos the last time. And check on the charter from Rome. Make them give us a backup.” He was still hurling instructions as he walked out the door.

She fielded eight more phone calls and spent a half hour with the airlines before she noticed that she hadn’t taken off her coat. Parker Dayton asked if she’d had enough yet. She gritted her teeth and told him she was having a terrific time, but as soon as he left the suite, she sagged into her chair. Parker was leaving the tour in three days to go back to New York. That’s how long she had to last. Three days.

She took a few minutes between phone calls to study the promotional kit, and when the lead guitarist for Neon Lynx walked in, she recognized him as Peter Zabel. He was in his early twenties, with a small, compact body and curly, shoulder-length black hair. Two earrings decorated his right lobe, one an enormous diamond and the other a long white feather. He asked her to put a call through to his broker in New York. He was worried about his Anaconda Copper.

After he got off the phone, he slouched down on the couch and propped his boots up on the coffee table. They had three-inch Lucite heels with embedded goldfish. “I’m the only one in the band who looks to the future,” he said suddenly. “The other guys think this is going to last forever, but I know it doesn’t happen that way, so I’m building a portfolio.”

“Probably a good idea.” She reached for the backstage passes and began to stamp them.

“Damned straight it’s a good idea. What’s your name anyway?”

She hesitated. “Fleur.”

“You look familiar. You a dyke?”

“Not at the moment.” She slammed the stamp down on the VIP pass. Whom did she think she was kidding? Three days was forever.

Peter got up and headed for the door. Suddenly he stopped and turned back. “I know where I saw you. You used to be a model or something. My kid brother had your poster up in his room, and you were in that movie I saw. Fleur…what’s it?”

“Savagar,” she made herself say. “Fleur Savagar.”

“Yeah. That’s right.” He didn’t seem impressed. He tugged on the white feather earring. “Listen, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but if you’d had a portfolio, you would of had something to fall back on after you was washed up.”

“I’ll remember that for the future.” The door shut behind him, and she realized that she was smiling for the first time in weeks. Around this crew anyway, the Glitter Baby was yesterday’s news. She felt as if she had more air to breathe.

The tour was opening that night at a sports arena north of Vienna, and once Stu came back with the errant roadie, she didn’t have a minute to think. First there was a ticket mix-up, and then the one-hour warning calls to the band. She had to be in the lobby early to double-check transportation and take care of tips. Then she had to make a second set of phone calls to the band members telling them the limos were ready. Stu yelled at her about everything, but he seemed to yell at everybody except the band, so she tried to ignore it. As far as she could tell, there were only two cardinal rules: keep the band happy, and double-check everything.

As the members of Neon Lynx wandered into the lobby, she identified each one. Peter Zabel she’d met. Kyle Light, the bass player, wasn’t hard to spot. He had thin blond hair, dead eyes, and a wasted look. Frank LaPorte, the drummer, was a belligerent redhead with a Budweiser can in his hand. Simon Kale, the keyboard player, was the fiercest-looking black man she’d ever seen, with a shaved and oiled head, silver chains draping an overdeveloped chest, and something that looked suspiciously like a machete hanging from his belt.

“Where’s that freakin’ Barry?” Stu called out. “Fleur, go up and get that son of a bitch down here. And don’t do anything to upset him, for chrissake.”

Fleur reluctantly headed for the elevator and the penthouse suite of lead singer Barry Noy. The promotional kit billed him as the new Mick Jagger. He was twenty-four, and his photographs showed him with long, sandy-colored hair and fleshy lips permanently set in a sneer. From bits and pieces of conversations, she’d gathered that Barry was “difficult,” but she didn’t let herself think too hard about what that might mean.

She knocked at the door of his suite, and when there was no answer, she tried the knob. It was unlocked. “Barry?”

He was stretched out on the couch, his forearm thrown across his eyes and his sandy hair dangling over the couch pillows toward the carpet. He wore the same satin trousers as the other members of the band, except his were Day-Glo orange with a red sequined star strategically placed over the crotch.

“Barry? Stu sent me up to get you. The limos are here, and we’re ready to go.”

“I can’t play tonight.”

“Uh…Why’s that?”

“I’m depressed.” He gave a protracted sigh. “I swear I have never been so depressed in my entire fucking life. I can’t sing when I’m depressed.”

Fleur glanced at her watch, a man’s gold Rolex Stu had loaned her that afternoon. She had five minutes. Five minutes and two and a half days. “What are you depressed about?”

For the first time he looked at her. “Who are you?”

“Fleur. The new road secretary.”

“Oh yeah, Peter told me about you. You used to be a big movie star or something.” He threw his arm back over his eyes. “I’m telling you, life is really shit. I mean I am really hot now. I can have any woman I want, but that bitch Kissy has me wrapped around her finger. I bet I called New York a hundred times today, but either I couldn’t get through or she never answered the phone.”

“Maybe she was out.”

“Yeah. She was out all right. Out with some stud.”

She had four minutes. “Would any woman in her right mind go out with another man when she could have you?” she said, even as she was thinking that any woman in her right mind would go out with a penguin before she’d go out with him. “I’ll bet your timing was bad. The time zones are confusing. Why don’t you try her after the concert? It’ll be early morning in New York. You’re sure to get her then.”

He seemed interested. “You think so?”

“I’m sure of it.” Three and a half minutes. If they had to wait for the elevator, she’d be in trouble. “I’ll even put through the call for you.”

“You’ll come here after the concert and help me get the call through?”

“Sure.”

He grinned. “Hey, that’s great. Hey, I think I’m going to like you.”

“Good. I’m sure I’m going to like you.” In a pig’s eye, you degenerate. Three minutes. “Let’s go downstairs.”

Barry propositioned her in the elevator between the ninth and tenth floors. When she refused him, he turned sullen, so she told him she thought she might have a venereal disease. That seemed to make him happy, and she delivered him to the lobby with thirty seconds to spare.

They arrived at the ice hockey arena. The stage had been erected at one end of the rink, and hundreds of fans pushed against the wooden barricades. Ignoring the opening band, they called out for Barry and the group. Stu threw a clipboard at Fleur and told her to double-check everything. By the time she went backstage to watch the show, the crowd’s screams had grown deafening. Just as she put in the pink rubber earplugs the stage manager handed her, the rink went dark. A voice bellowed over the loudspeaker, introducing the band in German. The screams turned into a solid wall of sound, and four spotlights hit the stage like atomic blasts. The beams of light collided and Neon Lynx ran forward.