The list ran to over twenty, but Harry always ended up picking from the same three movies. He’d basically given up commercially produced porn. Ever since he’d started filming himself having sex, over two years ago now, he found his home-made collection infinitely more arousing. For one thing, the girls were better looking. For another, he got to direct them exactly the way he wanted: thighs wide, lips parted, eyes always open and straight to camera. Other producers had Hollywood at their feet. Harry Greene had Hollywood on its knees, sucking his dick. Clicking on Keisha and Joanne, he threw the remote onto his Chinese silk bedspread and slipped a hand under the waistband of his Turnbull & Asser pyjamas, already hard with anticipation.
At thirty-nine years old, Harry Greene truly was the man who had everything. His Fraternity movies were the most successful comedy franchise of all time. As a result, he was not only wealthy beyond his own wildest dreams – his main residence, in Beverly Hills, was a 30,000-square-foot palace that made Versailles look poky, but he kept life interesting by maintaining fully staffed mansions in every habitable continent of the globe, for the rare occasions when he felt like a change of scene – but he was also worshipped by his peers in the movie business as little less than a god. Women fell into Harry Greene’s bed like ripe apples from a never-exhausted tree. Studio executives fell over themselves to make deals with him. In Los Angeles there was no party to which Harry Greene was not invited, no club of which he was not a member, no luxury known to man of which Harry was not able to avail himself, day or night, whenever he chose.
And yet Harry Greene was not a happy man.
Born into a stable, loving, middle-class family in a swish suburb of San Diego, Harry had always been blessed. Smart, charismatic and good-looking, he was popular at school and a natural success with women. By the time he met his wife Angelica, at a valley party when he was twenty-four, he was already a relatively successful producer, with two profitable indies under his belt and a reputation as an up-and-comer in the industry. This modest success was more than enough to earn him ready access to all of Hollywood’s many temptations. Having never denied himself in the past, Harry saw no reason to do so now, simply because he had moved one woman under his roof. He loved Angelica. She was smart, stunningly beautiful, loyal and undemanding. Harry had repaid her with a five-carat diamond, a new surname and an unlimited platinum AmEx card. With these gifts, he considered his spousal duties to be fully discharged.
It was a shock, therefore, when, after five years of marriage characterized by unfettered philandering on his part, Harry’s wife left him, suing for divorce on the grounds of his adultery.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Harry complained bitterly to the business acquaintances that he mistook for friends. ‘I gave her everything she wanted. I never said no to her. Never. How could she stab me in the back like this?’
For the first year, he was so bitter about Angelica’s blatant betrayal that he refused to speak to her at all, restricting all contact to terse exchanges between their respective battalions of attorneys. But eventually, being the magnanimous soul that he was, Harry met his ex-wife for lunch at one of his ex-houses, and it was here that she’d dropped the bombshell.
‘When did I first find out? Jeez, Harry, I don’t know. I think the first time someone said something to me was at Bob Grauman’s Halloween party. Some guy dressed as Richard Nixon was gossiping about you and Farrah James. I was in a werewolf mask at the time; I don’t think he even knew who I was. Anyway, after that I did some digging … you’ve only yourself to blame you know. More Chablis, honey?’
Harry Greene did not blame himself. Nor, any longer, did he blame poor Angelica. He blamed some loose-lipped cunt in a Richard Nixon mask. That shit-stirring little fucker, whoever he was, had ruined a perfectly happy marriage. In a town where marriages were considered a success if they outlived milk, Harry Greene considered himself to have been seriously hard done by, wantonly robbed of something rare and precious, something that was his – that should have been his – for life. He did some digging of his own. And lo and behold, his nemesis had a name! A name that Harry Greene had come to loathe over the years with a passion bordering on the pathological: Dorian Rasmirez.
So stealing my scripts wasn’t enough for you, eh? Or turning my writers against me? Oh no. You have to take my wife from me too? My wife!
What stung the most was that Dorian’s own marriage remained a Hollywood paragon. Of course, everyone knew Rasmirez’s wife was a slut, a middle-aged, over-the-hill TV actress who fucked everything with a pulse under thirty in a sad attempt to keep her husband’s attention. Yet Dorian stood by her, besotted, proclaiming his cuckolded love for her from the rooftops. Harry Greene wanted to destroy Dorian Rasmirez’s marriage, to take away his wife the way that Dorian had taken away Angelica. But the Rasmirezes remained tighter than ever, a fact that ate away at Harry like a flesh-rotting virus.
He’d tried to numb the pain by hurting Dorian professionally, using his immense influence with studios, distributors and the media to damage his rival’s movies. Harry liked to think that by deliberately moving the release date of the most recent Fraternity film so that it coincided with Rasmirez’s dull and worthy war flick, he’d put the final nail in the coffin of Sixteen Nights. ‘He’ll be lucky if it runs for fourteen nights,’ Harry told a reporter from Variety, in a quote that made headlines across the industry – and turned out to be an accurate prophecy. The film bombed. But the satisfaction it gave Harry to know that Rasmirez had lost money was fleeting. Money could always be replaced. A marriage, on the other hand, once destroyed was destroyed forever.
On the screen in front of him, two girls were giving each other head. One was black, the other Asian. Both were perfect physical specimens, narrow-hipped and boyish, the way Harry liked them, but with outlandishly large, round breasts stuck to their ribs like two soccer balls. Every couple of seconds they looked up from each other’s pussies and stared into the camera, while Harry whispered obscenities at them. As always it was the look in their eyes that made him come. So desperate, so wholly under his control. Harry Greene liked things being under his control. It made him feel that life was as it should be.
Grabbing a tissue from the box by the bed, he cleaned himself up and reached for the phone. It was midnight in LA, but the person he was calling was in Europe and would have been up for at least two hours. They picked up immediately. Just hearing their voice on the line gave Harry a thrill far stronger than the orgasm he’d just finished.
‘It’s me. Harry. Listen, I need to talk to you. Uh-uh, no, in person. How soon can you be on a plane?’
He hung up two minutes later, suffused with a feeling he hadn’t experienced in years: contentment. Dorian Rasmirez was shooting his Wuthering Heights remake somewhere in England. Everyone knew that. Everyone also knew that he’d paid way over the odds for the Hudson kid and been left so broke he’d been forced to cast Sabrina Leon as his female lead. The details of the production itself were shrouded in secrecy. Some saw this as a deliberate attempt by Dorian to create mystique, to get everybody talking about his big ‘comeback’ movie. But Harry Greene saw it differently
He’s hiding from me, he thought, smugly. He’s running scared. And so he should be.
Harry Greene had a secret of his own.
He was about to blow Dorian Rasmirez out of the water.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sabrina awoke gripped with fear. A familiar fear: her bedroom door was rattling. It was him, Graham Cooper, the foster ‘brother’ who’d abused her as a kid back in Fresno, coming to ‘cuddle’ her, as he called it. Already she could smell the foul excitement on Graham’s breath, see his sallow, twenty-year-old cheeks flushing as he slipped under her bedclothes, telling her not
