Let There Be Lite - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rupert Morgan was born in London in 1965, to Scottish parents. He currently lives, with his wife and two daughters, on a boat in Paris. Rule No.1 is his third novel. His first two, Let There Be Lite and Something Sacred, are also available in Bantam paperback. Rupert Morgan can be contacted on rupert.morgan@wanadoo.fr

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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars . . . That's us all right, Susan Summerday reflected: in the gutter, looking at the stars.

Breaking our damn necks.

The previous owner of the Hotel Excelsior broke his by taking God's elevator from the penthouse terrace down to 16th Avenue. Which, it has to be said, is about the most stylish way a man could commit suicide in Entropolis. You're still just a mess on the sidewalk, of course, but a mess with an address.

Turning her back on the chattering huddles in the penthouse Banqueting Room, Susan let the velvet of the curtains brush her bare shoulder as she gazed out over the city and downed the rest of her champagne in one long, ladylike sip. The curtains, hanging long and rich from the high ceiling, were held apart like spread legs by sashes at the knees. Standing between their thighs, gazing over the city, Susan Summerday could justifiably consider herself one of the select few, sitting on top of all the humans piled up on this rock, looking down upon the world.

From which vantage point, if she was honest with herself, it made no more sense than it did from anywhere else.

It never had, and it most likely never would. Which was probably why it came to be about making all these other things: a name, a splash, money, or at least ends that met . . . because it apparently couldn't make that one simple thing that would make everything else all right: sense.

And it came to be about cities like Entropolis, a vast beast of ambition to swallow people whole and shit them stripped of innocence. They slid out the other end looking much the same, like tinned corn, but they were almost as empty as the reflections Susan Summerday saw in the glass before her - those of her husband Michael, the fifty-odd smiling couples who comprised the ilite political strata of these great United States of Atlantis, and, almost invisible but for the whites of their eyes, the unsmiling waiters.

For they did not have to smile, of course. That was where they could find superiority over these pale, cream-voiced people they were here to serve.

Susan Summerday, for instance, had to smile like she was an advertisement for life itself. For eight years she had smiled the smile of a vice-president's wife, the smile of a Senator's wife for a decade prior to that, and now, God help her, she had to smile the smile of a woman whose husband should be elected President.

She sometimes believed it was only the lotions that kept her pretty face from cracking in two.

But tonight, she knew, she would smile especially brightly, a smile just for their host, should he ever deign to turn up.

The surprise in political circles had been palpable when, after a prolonged period of secrecy, the identity of the venerable hotel's new owner was revealed to be John Lockes. Why on earth would the reclusive billionaire, whom no one outside the confines of Infologix's hi-tech headquarters had seen in nigh-on ten years, want to buy the Excelsior? His field was information technology, not hotels. True, he'd branched out last year by taking over P. S. Yorsakt, the fast-food conglomerate, but the debt-ridden Excelsior? It wasn't even a serious hotel, for that matter, being more of a political club masquerading as a hotel. What it lost in money it more than made up for in kudos, but that was of no interest to a man like Lockes, unless . . .

And sure enough, the pieces had started to fall into place. That initial surprise had mutated into suspicion as the invitations to tonight's select party arrived. It was all too clear: Lockes is one of the single most generous donators to the campaign funds of politicians across the spectrum; Lockes buys the Excelsior; Lockes invites a small band of key power-brokers to an informal get-together . . . ergo Lockes wanted something back for his years of generosity.

Nothing could be more natural, of course, but the frisson it had sent through their subtle community was all the greater for the fact that he had never, in all his years of fiscal support, contacted any of them personally, let alone asked anything in return. Susan Summerday knew it had everyone else in the room as rattled as Michael, coming just months away from the elections. There was nothing that a politician liked less than not knowing the price of a bargain he had already made. Not that that ever stopped them, in her experience.

But which of them could refuse their host anything now? To provoke his wrath, to make him switch his financial support to an opponent, would be suicide: John Lockes, the founder and president of Infologix, was the richest man in the world.

Quite literally the host with the most.

The actual figures involved were beyond Susan's comprehension, but it was enough for her to know that one of the country's leading collections of modern art was owned by a man who, fifteen years ago, had accepted the offer of a few Infologix shares in lieu of the price of the pizza he had been delivering to Lockes' student dorm. Lucky son of a bitch. Legend has it that it was even the wrong pizza.