The Pleasure Quartet (25 page)

Noah’s attention was wandering when she intervened. The Handsomes did well in the UK, but not on the same scale as in other territories where the rock scene was slower evolving. But the suggestion made sense, he knew. The duo were a low-cost outfit, and the injection of some added marketing cash could well provide their back catalogue as well as their latest album with a significant spike in sales.

He looked across the wide table at Michèle. Caught her eyes and nodded, hinting that she had his support should it come to an improvised vote. She held his gaze, her features severe, sharp cheekbones to the fore, an electronic cigarette dangling from her lips. For a brief moment, he imagined her in black leather and vertiginous heels with a whip in her hand, a daunting figure of a dominatrix. He smiled at the notion. She smiled back. He would have to ask Viggo if there were any interesting rumours about Michèle’s sexual proclivities. Viggo knew all the dirt in the business and relished telling tales. Even if he wasn’t quite as forthcoming when it came to Summer Zahova, for some reason.

A thought occurred.

‘Do you have the tour’s full itinerary, by any chance?’ Noah asked.

‘Of course.’

Michèle rummaged through her folders and pulled out a couple of sheets of A4 paper which she slid over to Noah.

The Handsomes’ tour was scheduled to debut in Puerto Rico, before moving on to Panama, and a cluster of club dates arranged in Cancun to coincide with the riotous days of spring break when hordes of thirsty and heavy-money-spending American students swarmed over the Mexican coastal resort. There was a short break arranged and then the main part of the tour began with visits to Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile and, finally, Argentina. It was a gruelling schedule, and a testimony to the hardworking ethos of the duo and the reason they had not faded away, as so many groups did, after their initial success.

The Brazilian dates were to be in Rio and São Paulo in six weeks’ time.

The conversations around the table continued but Noah’s mind had by now drifted, unhealthily drawn like a magnet to the two lines on the band’s itinerary. Should he? Could he?

Michèle had arranged to book a back room in one of the area’s best Moroccan restaurants for the assembled executives to dine in after the meeting broke up. They walked over to the rue Monsieur Le Prince and walked down the steep hill towards it. Noah arranged to sit next to her.

‘I’ve never seen them live,’ he said, referring to The Handsomes. ‘I was away on the West Coast on both occasions that they played New York.’

‘You should,’ Michèle remarked. ‘They put on a spectacular show. Amazing stuff with the lighting.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘And they’re also lovely guys. I really think you could do better with them in your territory.’

‘Love their sound, but from the records I’ve always felt they were more of a club thing, maybe not big enough presence-wise for larger venues where the real money is and word of mouth originates.’

‘Go and see them. You might change your mind.’

‘Maybe I will.’

The heaving bowls of couscous, jugs of hot sauce and platters of mutton, brochettes and meat balls were delivered to the long table at which they were all sitting.

‘When I get back to the office, I’ll text you the telephone numbers for their management. Maybe you can set something up with them? See what can be arranged.’

‘That would be good.’

It was all the excuse Noah needed. Back in London the next day, he made a beeline for his office straight from the St Pancras Eurostar terminal and arrived just in time to ask Rhonda to make all the arrangements for the trip. If she was surprised by his decision, she gave no sign of it, imperturbable as ever. It was some time since he had been on the road with a band.

A few weeks later, he arrived in Panama. As he walked out of the plane onto the ramp, the heat cloaked him in one gulp like a damp blanket rolling over his jetlagged body. By the time he reached the luggage carousel, after an interminable delay at passport control where just one official was processing two planeloads of arriving passengers, his pale blue shirt was sticking to his back.

There was no one to meet him and he caught a cab to the hotel where he knew The Handsomes and their managers and crew were staying. The cool gusts of the air-conditioning rushed towards him as the uniformed doorman held the wide glass doors open for him and a matching bellboy ran towards him to take his one piece of luggage and place it on a trolley while he checked in. He retained his computer case, which hung from his shoulders. It was frayed at the edges; he’d picked it up as a freebie on an old tour for which Bridget had provided second support and it held a strong sentimental value for him; he carried his papers, a couple of paperbacks, documents, assorted toiletries and odds and sods in it.

‘Business or pleasure, sir?’ the pretty receptionist asked with an artificial smile.

‘Both.’

Entering the large, airy room, he could have been anywhere in the world – geometrical configuration, soft shag carpet, assembly-line top-of-the range functional furniture – until he pulled the curtains open after the bellboy, duly tipped, had left.

He was on the fifteenth floor and the view ranged across roofs and fields all the way to a bluer-than-blue ocean. The band was camped out in a set of luxury cabanas surrounding the outside pool, but since Noah was partly in holiday mode he had upgraded to a suite on the hotel’s top floor. He always enjoyed having a view. He hadn’t looked up anything about Panama before coming here. All he was aware of was its famed canal. But the light was white and flat and dazzling, the sky aquamarine, and a faint smell of spices lingered in the air, blending uncomfortably with some fragrance the room had been sprayed with by the hotel cleaner shortly before his arrival.

‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Noah wondered aloud. It was mid-afternoon but his body was weary, still on European time. He would sleep. Meet up with the band tomorrow, he decided. He stripped.

Alain, Stéphane and the rest of the crew had risen hours before Noah, despite having apparently all spent the previous night out on the town. The two young musicians and their entourage had taken over a large round table in the hotel’s dining area and were busily gorging themselves on the buffet breakfast, a cornucopia of tropical fruit platters, corn tortillas, meat dishes and the usual fare of miniature boxed cereals, containers of low-fat yoghurt and slices of countless varieties of bread that was always on hand in hotels around the world for unadventurous tourists.

Noah took a large plate up to the hot food counter and ordered the Panamanian breakfast: fresh fried beef flavoured with garlic and paprika, which came with a liberal serving of salty fried dough balls and a scoop of spicy scrambled eggs. He carried his mountain of food towards the table where a pot of fresh coffee and jugs of juice already awaited.

Sampling the local cuisine was invariably one of Noah’s favourite parts of travelling, and he did so with relish now that April was not eyeing his plate and tutting while she munched on wheat-free granola, egg-white omelette, or whatever her latest diet happened to entail. He had been blessed with one of those metabolisms that enabled him to eat whatever he liked and stay in moderately good shape, and he never gave a second thought to the state of his arteries or his cholesterol count.

There was one free seat, apparently saved for him, alongside a pixie-sized girl in her mid-twenties with hair cropped in varying short lengths that formed a bob-like helmet around her skull in a mess of dark roots and peroxide blonde ends. She had a sharp, pointed nose and a face shaped like an upside-down teardrop with a wide forehead, angular cheekbones and narrow, pointed chin. Her brows were thick and formed two animated dark streaks across her temples.

When she spotted Noah heading towards them she rose to her feet and waved, sending the jangling stack of silver bracelets that circled her wrist down her stick-thin arm where they were prevented from dropping all the way to her armpit only by the barrier of her elbow. Her cupid’s-bow red lips opened into a round O as she called out to him.

‘Hey, Noah,’

He racked his memory but didn’t think they had met previously. Surely he would have remembered. Roadies were a dime a dozen and he had been vaguely introduced to hundreds over the years, but nearly all of them were men, and fewer still were slim young blondes.

She extended her hand and Noah took it. Her grip was firm, although he felt like a giant with her tiny palm within his grasp.

‘I’m Dana,’ she said. ‘Michèle told us to expect you.’ She had an unusual accent with a strong US twang. Later she told him that she had grown up in Serbia glued to American TV shows before moving Stateside and meeting The Handsomes at a Cinnabon store in Florida during one of their early club tours. She had ended up training on the sound crew before being promoted to PA and all-round assistant, with her ability to help out on the technical side an added bonus. She was now based in Paris and an indispensable part of the duo’s team as principal troubleshooter and maid of all trades.

Dana introduced him to the others. Pete and Jerry, the senior technical guys on lighting and sound, who were both in their thirties and looked distinctly bored and tired in comparison with the exuberant expressions and unlined faces of their assistants, who were relatively new to life on the road.

Even if Noah hadn’t already seen publicity pics of Alain and Stéphane, they would have been immediately recognisable as the actual stars of the band before they were pointed out to him. Oftentimes, off-duty rockstars and musicians were like actors away from camera or the stage and surprisingly meek and ordinary without an instrument or a microphone in hand. These two were the polar opposite of that. A blind hermit with a total ignorance of pop culture could have sensed the energy that they exuded and the chemistry that popped between the pair.

Alain was the more extroverted of the two, and jumped to his feet to greet Noah, embracing him in a particularly Eurocentric-style hug, complete with light kiss on each cheek. He wore tight skinny jeans in a coral red shade with a short-sleeved thin cotton shirt over the top, buttoned all the way up to the collar. Stéphane stayed seated, and reached across the table to shake Noah’s hand. He had on a baggy black and grey Religion T-shirt that featured a woman’s face with just one eye visible, the rest covered by a stylised hand with all its bones protruding like an X-ray skeleton, and an oversized, thin grey snood that he would surely have to abandon when they left the cool air-conditioned comfort of the hotel.

Noah was aware, from past press releases and many magazine articles, that the two French deejays had been childhood friends, but they could have easily passed for brothers, with their matching slim-line, medium-height figures and identical shaggy brown hair, cut and styled to achieve just the right degree of detached cool.

Noah suspected that the few thin blond streaks they both sported in their long fringes owed more to the bottle than any time spent in the sun; a sign of stylists getting involved to manufacture whatever they deemed to be a more commercial image. They’d come up through the scene at the same time as Daft Punk, but unlike their counterparts did not conceal their faces from their public.

‘Good to meet you both at last,’ Noah told them. ‘I’ve heard great things. I’ve always been a fan of your sound.’

‘It’s our pleasure,’ Alain responded. ‘We’re flattered you’ve come all the way out here.’ He spoke fluent English with a mid-Atlantic accent.

They knew, no doubt, of his status at the label and the fact that a positive word from Noah could mean an injection of PR cash from their label’s British arm and a chance to spread their wings further worldwide. Stéphane was appraising him curiously, probably wondering why an English record exec who had previously shown little interest in the two of them should bother to travel all the way to Central and South America out of the blue to watch them perform live.

Noah had no intention of explaining himself. They could think whatever they liked. He poured a strong black coffee from the cafetière – still piping hot, since the roving waitress attending to their table had noticed him join the party and brought a fresh pot – and bit into one of the fried dough balls. They were covered in powdered sugar and the flavour was at once sweet and savoury and took him by surprise.

‘So, what are the plans for today?’ he asked, between forkfuls.

‘We’re headlining at Next tomorrow night,’ Alain told him. ‘The place is pretty huge. We’re going down there later on before doors open to run some soundchecks and liaise with their on site crew. Until then . . . sun, pool, while we can. Might take a trip into the city later, maybe the casinos. You’re welcome to join us.’

They agreed to meet up in the lobby at 9 p.m. and then find somewhere for a late dinner, which would give the band and tech guys enough time to approve the set-up at Next for the following night’s gig.

Noah remained at the breakfast table to finish off his coffee as the others trooped out. He declined to join in with their day-time activities, since strictly speaking he was not out here on vacation and had to go online and attend to the backlog of emails and messages that had no doubt reached his inbox over the course of his absence from the office so far.

He also hoped that during the flight over Viggo might have discovered some further nugget of information about Summer and mailed it to him. Fat chance of that, he mused, but it was the only vague hope he hung onto. Noah had told Viggo in advance about his impromptu trip with The Handsomes, and prompted him to follow up again with Susan to check if there had been any developments on her side.

His room had wi-fi and, to his surprise, a pretty good connection. He pulled open the thick black-out curtains, letting bright shafts of light stream in through the wide French doors, and settled onto the white leather bucket-shaped swivel chair, angling his screen away from the sun’s glare.

There was a whole raft of correspondence from Rhonda listing phone calls that he had missed and minutes from meetings that he had been due to attend. She had kindly sent him an abbreviated summary of all the urgent things he needed to do, letting him know that he could ignore most of the rest as office politics and waffle.